Harold B. Nelson, with contributions by Jeremy Adamson, Jason T. Busch, Jonathan Leo Fairbanks, Kay Sekimachi, and Tia Vasiliou. The House That Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945–1985. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2011. 192 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., bibliography, index. $39.95; $29.95 pb.
When he died in 2009 at the age of ninety-three, Sam Maloof was easily the most famous living furniture maker in America, and possibly better known in his time than any American furniture maker has ever been. Maloof started making furniture in the late 1940s as many furniture makers have started, designing and building furniture for his own use out of scrounged plywood and two-by-fours. By the time he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1985, his furniture was in the national collection of the Smithsonian Institution and in the private collections of two U.S. presidents.
Maloof worked in a style that was familiar. Blending elements of Shaker furniture and Danish modern design, it was comfortable in every sense of the word, yet recognizably his own. It was a style developed over the course of a lifetime spent living and working in the Pomona Valley of Southern California as a member of what has come to be recognized as an extraordinary community of artists, nurtured by the academics of the Claremont Colleges and stimulated by the energy of nearby Los Angeles. Maloof worked in a home and studio that he built and furnished in nearby Alta Loma, expanding it from a one-room cottage in 1953 to the ten-thousand-square-foot house, now home to the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts, which was required to hold his ever-expanding collection of the work of the dozens of artists living and working around Claremont who were his close friends and associates.
The House That Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945–1985 is the catalogue of an exhibition by the same name mounted in 2011 by the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, in conjunction with “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980,” a collaboration of sixty Southern California institutions brought together through a ten-million-dollar grant from the Getty Foundation in a series of exhibitions and related activities to celebrate the breadth and impact of postwar Los Angeles artists. As the Huntington’s contribution to “Pacific Standard Time,” lead author and American decorative arts curator Harold B. Nelson set out to mount an exhibition that would bring attention to the diversity and influence of the Pomona Valley art scene. He chose as the exhibition’s organizing element the life and work of Sam Maloof, rather than an artist working in a more traditional artistic medium. Nelson thought that Maloof’s single-minded pursuit of his own artistic voice, his close network of friends and fellow artists, and his abiding sense of community could best express the spirit, talent, and influence of the region. In addition, the national prominence of the community’s lone furniture maker would create long lines at the show’s opening and attract visitors from across the country. “Sam was so well known and so highly regarded,” says Nelson, “that we knew people would come to the show to see his work, and have their eyes opened to these other marvelous artists as well” (Harold Nelson, telephone interview, June 20, 2012).
The House That Sam Built is not about the house that Maloof actually built over a period of thirty years, room by room and largely by hand, to contain his overflowing collection of books, artworks, pottery, baskets, turned bowls, sculptures, furniture, and found objects. Nelson uses the word house in a metaphoric sense, but the title is well chosen. With its nursery rhyme associations recalling childhood innocence, it brings to mind a simpler life and a simpler time, one that captures the ethos of the artists, craftsmen, and designers who thrived in the Pomona Valley of Southern California in the years following World War II.
By 1945 Claremont had emerged from the Depression as a regional art center under the leadership of a youthful and dynamic Millard Sheets, who was named the first member of the art faculty of Scripps College in 1931 at the age of twenty-five. Over the next twenty-three years, as chair of the Scripps Art Department, Sheets brought painters, sculptors, muralists, ceramists, and weavers to Claremont as faculty members and visiting artists. Many stayed to enjoy the Southern California climate and the supportive environment of such a diverse, educated, and affluent milieu. Sheets was also an early friend and supporter of Maloof, employing him as his studio assistant from 1945 until 1947, when Maloof set out on his own to make furniture full-time. The introductions to fellow artists Maloof made through Sheets, including noted designer Henry Dreyfuss, would prove to be an important source of early commissions as well as lifetime friendships.
The Huntington’s exhibition, which was open from September 2011 to January 2012, included thirty-five pieces of Sam Maloof’s furniture along with eighty-one examples of the work of thirty-five of his artist friends. The exhibition catalogue is divided into two roughly equal sections. Photographs of Maloof’s furniture are presented in the first half of the book, with a collection of five essays on his life and work. Taken together, these essays present a portrait of Maloof that complements the two principal references that document his life and work (the autobiography, Sam Maloof, Woodworker [1983], and Jeremy Adamson’s catalogue of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition, “The Furniture of Sam Maloof” [2001]) by providing a more personal, anecdotal picture of his home and life and adding to the scholarly research on his work.
The opening essay by Harold Nelson describes his intention to use the life and work of Sam Maloof as a window into the richness and diversity of the artists who thrived in the Pomona Valley from 1945 to 1985, nurtured and supported by the academic environment of the Claremont Colleges. It was a milieu characterized by a plethora of talent, optimism, and mutual support. It was also a place that gave much to the young and aspiring Maloof, in the form of both furniture commissions that supported his young family and collegiality with artists who shared their work and their lives in a way that nourished Maloof’s fierce independence. In the Claremont community there was an openness and a spirit of collaboration that Maloof would feel bound to repay by welcoming thousands of visitors to his home and studio over the course of his life. As he settled in and built his house in Alta Loma, he surrounded himself with the work of his friends, creating an environment that celebrated the importance of well-designed and well-made objects as an integral part of everyday life. In the end, Nelson observes, “as much as ‘the house that Sam built’ was a testimony to the brilliance of his own personal achievement, it was a celebration of the community of which he was so central a part” (pp. 23–24).
Jeremy Adamson’s contribution, “The Furniture That Sam Built,” anchors the group of essays, providing a detailed account of Maloof’s evolution from an amateur woodworker, building furniture to furnish his first home in 1945, to a sought-after and world-famous furniture artist and recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius award.” Much of the essay focuses on the formative 1950s, detailing the succession of clients and commissions that allowed Maloof to build his practice and his reputation, refining his designs in the process. Adamson’s analysis includes detailed references to Scandinavian furniture designers and their chair designs, adding to the scholarship provided by his own earlier writings in The Furniture of Sam Maloof. As Danish modern gave way to the more decorative and traditional styles of the 1960s and 1970s, Adamson describes Maloof’s focus on his personal style, independent of both the commercial designers and the contemporary craft movement of the time. As Adamson describes it, “His style, now firmly established as his own, simply became slowly but surely more sculptural, with an increasing emphasis on the tactile properties of arms, joinery and crest rails” (pp. 55–56).
Jason T. Busch, a curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art, contributed the essay “In Words and Wood,” which links Maloof’s focus on the tactile, sculptural qualities of wood and the richness of expression found in exposing its grain with the work of two well-known wood turners, Bob Stocksdale and Ed Moulthrop. The development of deep friendships among the three is documented in their letters, offering praise and mutual support, illustrating again the critical importance of the nurturing community that characterized Maloof’s life.
The two concluding essays provide insight into the life and work of Sam Maloof from a more personal, firsthand point of view. In “An Abiding Friendship,” Nelson interviews Kay Sekimachi, the wife of Bob Stocksdale, one of Maloof’s closest friends and collaborators, eliciting reflections on her forty-year history with Maloof and her husband’s sixty-year relationship, including dinner table conversations, trips taken together, and the network of friends both couples shared. “Sam Maloof’s Transformative Vision” by Jonathan Leo Fairbanks is another personal reminiscence, this one of a close personal friendship that developed from an initial meeting at a professional conference in 1966, a meeting that would change the arc of the careers of both men. These two essays are the weakest of the group. Sekimachi’s reminiscences, responses to questions in a Q-and-A format, lack focus or insight. Fairbanks is at his best setting Maloof’s life in the context of the postwar craft movement, but the essay also retraces biographical material already covered by Adamson.
The second half of the book includes brief biographies of the thirty-five contributing artists and photographs of their work from the exhibition. Some objects were taken from Maloof’s house, as the exhibition’s title suggests, but the majority were borrowed from public and private collections throughout Southern California. All together, the objects and the published essays complement an earlier study of the artists working in the Pomona Valley, Art at Pomona, 1887–1987 (1987) by Marjorie Harth Beebe, director of the Galleries of the Claremont Colleges. The breadth and depth of the work and the backgrounds of the artists represented support the contention of James Strombotne, one of the featured artists, that “Claremont was a Mecca for art and artists” who were “gloriously independent, no two of us alike. The common denominators were great talent and courage and brains and dedication” (p. 18). The diversity of the work presented is a celebration of the individual artistic vision that was so valued and nurtured by the Pomona Valley art community rather than a collective artistic sensibility.
That respect for individual vision, coupled with the strong sense of community among Pomona Valley artists, asks questions about the nature and importance of artistic influence. Looking at the exhibition as a whole, it is a challenge to see the connections between artists in their work or to understand, as the exhibition’s publicity states, “Maloof’s contribution to the development of art in Southern California.” None of the essays deals directly with issues of artistic influence. Each of the exhibition objects is beautifully photographed but presented individually and without scale or context. Readers of the exhibition catalogue do not have the benefit of the curator’s insights into artistic influence that were available to exhibition visitors through the installation’s pairings of art objects and furniture. (Due to publication deadlines, photographs of the exhibition, as is almost always the case, could not be included in the catalogue.) Seeing the objects in their original setting, in photographs of Sam’s house, would have provided some insight into connections that Maloof saw in the objects that he collected, but by his own admission, his art and artifacts were an ad-hoc assembly of gifts, trades, and purchases, “not consciously collected,” as he noted in his 1983 autobiography. The collection was displayed in his home with a corresponding lack of consciousness. “That isn’t arranged. I just put those things there,” he wrote (p. 199).
That apparent casualness belies the focus and deliberateness with which Maloof lived his life. As Adamson writes in his essay tracing the development of Maloof’s signature style, the furniture maker set out early on his own path. He crafted his life as he crafted his furniture, with an attention to detail and an unswerving sense of the importance of friendships and community. His vision, like the nursery rhyme title of the book, was childlike in its simplicity but so clear and complete that he had to create, by building his home and studio, his own world to live in. The house that he built and the art with which he surrounded himself were not so much a collection of objects that could reveal a narrative of artistic influence as they were a collection of his relationships with others, a recording of individual friendships embedded in those objects. It was simply, as Nelson observes, testament to Maloof’s “commitment to objects well made and a life well lived” (p. 13).
The intention of The House That Sam Built was to tell the story of the post–World War II art scene in the Pomona Valley of Southern California, using Maloof as the narrator and the work of his friends as illustrations. Although it is not a definitive monograph on either Sam Maloof or the Pomona Valley artists, it is a worthy addition to the Maloof scholarship as well as an intriguing glimpse into an extraordinary group of artists and a significant place and time in the development of American art.
If there is one element lacking in this book, it is a concluding essay that describes the decisions leading to the selection of objects that were included in the exhibition. Many objects were taken from public and private collections rather than from Maloof’s home. Why? Presumably the selections were made so as to create the most coherent and representative exhibition of the work of the Pomona Valley artists. A description of the curatorial process could have provided insight into the connections between objects and makers. Can it be said that the Pomona Valley artists represented a “school”? Apparently not, but why not?
The House That Sam Built raises but does not answer many questions about the importance of milieu and mutual support, the nature of artistic influence, and whether or not such a community could exist today. They are questions well worth thinking about.
Miguel Gómez-Ibáñez
North Bennet Street School