Credit Due in Eames’ ‘World’

It’s Monday morning, June 7. Astonished, I see my work on the front page of Calendar! I remember making this unsigned drawing many years ago. But nobody knows it’s mine.

It is one of three images illustrating Stanley Meisler’s excellent story “A Seat of Honor in American Design”--describing the

exhibit “The World of Charles and Ray Eames,” now on view at the Library of Congress in Wash-

ington. This sketch for a promotional postcard that I designed for their chairs was chosen from hundreds of images. And here it is, next to the famous photograph of Charles and Ray on a motorcycle.

I was 22, a post-Bard College student who fell in love with the New Bauhaus in Chicago. I had been selected to spend a summer working at the already legendary Eames Office (in California!). I got hooked. The summer extended into fall. Its cumulative duration lasted more than a decade.

As the madeleine was to Proust, the postcard image created waves of memories about my intense relationship with Charles and Ray, and with others who participated in those glorious, demanding and rewarding years, which, despite all the explanations in current literature, escape definition. Consumed with the passion to turn ideas into reality, we all went far beyond the “extra mile.” It had nothing to do with money or “the bottom line” and everything to do with producing “the best, for the most people, as much as is possible, for all of the time.”

Wandering through the exhibit a few weeks ago, I was surprised and honored to see how many of my own forgotten sketches and drawings, made for different projects, were on display in a museum setting and side by side with serious and major contributions to life in the mid-20th century.

“Why,” I asked curator Donald Albrecht, “are so many of my works included?” His response: “We simply chose what we thought was most beautiful.”

Of course, he couldn’t have known whose works they were. In the Eames world, as Paul Goldberger quoted me in the May 24 issue of the New Yorker, “When you left, you didn’t have much work to take with you--it was all theirs. They used it all or put it into their archives.” At the Eames Office, we were building cathedrals. It was mid-century: a time of heroes, not of heroines and not the young. We never signed our names. Not even Ray.

It is not the case that my work, and that of the other major contributors at the Eames Office, was independent of their enormous influence, genius and inspiration. We are all grateful and we all acknowledge the source. That work would not have happened had it not happened there. But without us and with others in our place, it would have happened differently!

How times change. Today, young designers--and seasoned ones too--claim authorship of everything they have a hand in. It’s a sensitive issue: I believe in giving credit whenever it’s due. As I have learned from the experience of running a design office, major design projects require a team whose members all make contributions. The office I founded, Sussman / Prejza & Co., created and collaborated on many local and global design programs, ranging from the “look” of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles to the logo and signing for the city of Santa Monica and its Big Blue Bus. When our work is published, a list of those who contributed is right there, and when people leave, they take documentation with them.

P.S. For the 1957 Eames movie “Day of the Dead” (Dia de los Muertos), on which I worked extensively, I included my name and the names of other major contributors in the credits. One of them, Parke Meek, reminds me that when Charles saw the titles on my desk, he said, “What’s this?” I answered, “Didn’t they work on the film?” No response. Apparently that was the first time he had shared credit with anyone but Ray.

Deborah Sussman is a pioneer of environmental graphic design. Hollywood & Highland is one of many current projects. She can be reached at dsussman@sussmanprejza.com.