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Contents
_________________________________________ Interview with the Grottas 9 _________________________________________ Foreword Richard Meier 29 _________________________________________ Foreword Jack Lenor Larsen 39 _________________________________________ The Universe of the Grotta House 45 Joseph Giovannini _________________________________________ Passageways 79 Roomscapes Tabletops
93 133
_________________________________________ A Vessel for Living Glenn Adamson 141 Basketry
169
Artist Reflections John McQueen
185
Ceramics
195
Artist Reflections On Toshiko Takaezu
215
Fiber
223
Artist Reflections Sheila Hicks
245
Wood
253
Artist Reflections On Edgar and Joyce Anderson
265
Sandy’s Jewelry Collection Matthew Drutt
275
Artist Reflections Wendy Ramshaw and David Watkins
295
Interplay
305
_________________________________________ Artist Index 313 Page Index 321
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W
hat were your homes like growing up?
Lou: I grew up in a deservedly forgotten architect’s nondescript West Orange, New Jersey home, decorated in my mother’s indecision with an all-pink master bedroom. Sandy: The spacious home I grew up in in the gracious Palmer Woods neighborhood of Detroit was of combined Tudor revival, Neo-Georgian and arts-and-crafts architecture with a healthy dose of hand-painted Pewabic tiles throughout. My parents furnished its spaces with a tasteful monotone assemblage of purportedly English antiques they were ever rearranging. Unlike the broad expanses of glass that made birdwatchers out of Lou and I, the traditional small-paned windows I grew up with largely limited my view out to mother’s manicured gardens and their beautiful peacock population. When and where did you two get together? Sandy: At the University of Michigan in 1953 when a friend fixed up a more-drinker-than-dater junior, liquid Lou Grotta. Lou: With an as-much-as-she-wanted-to-be-popular sophomore, Sandy Brown.
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When you arrived in Ann Arbor, did either of you bring along an interest in architecture, art and design? Sandy: Frankly, no. My eyes were mainly centered on shopping and boys. I never ever got around to visiting Cranbrook until I was well into my junior year in Ann Arbor. Lou: On a couple of occasions, my mother force marched me to the Metropolitan Museum to appreciate Rembrandt and company. I was duly impressed by the Museum’s soaring architecture but its contents never came close to replacing Ebbets Field in Brooklyn when my beloved Dodgers were in play as my favorite field of vision. Their first home
Was there a catalyst that tweaked your joint interests in art and architecture? Sandy: It was at the insistence of many of our non-art major Michigan friends that we signed up for a couple of Professor Marvin Eisenberg’s “Introduction to the History of Art and Architecture” courses. His rollicking, illuminating grand tour from Raphael’s School of Athens to Edward Munch’s Scream, from the Parthenon to the Pantheon to Falling Water opened our eyes to two lifetimes of great looking. How would you describe your first home? Lou: Not likely to appear on the cover of
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with terraces, the paths stabilized the house on the slope-like extensions from the house to the landscape. Even if the house is designed as a geometric collage of incomplete Euclidean forms, each part of the house belongs to a consistent underlying grid, and the implicit sense of control calms the interior. It is within this calm that the Grottas display their works. The works are always at rest in a space of their own without the tension or resistance coming from a house suffering from the architectural agita of too many forms, or from the constraints of closed rooms that subdivide the collection and keep the craft pieces from flowing and connecting with each other as an ensemble. An ethos of perfection pervades this house, much like the perfectly ordered worlds created by Renaissance architects: fresh with the discovery of perspective, they depicted classicized buildings receding to shared vanishing points deep in infinity. Calm reigns. Similarly, Meier’s gridded world, with its regulated mathematical pulse, thrums subliminally through the structure. The baked-steel panels cladding the exterior elevated the grid into the third dimension. The precision of that three-dimensional matrix, based on a 32-inch module, adds up to a perfectly ordered
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Living Room
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Den
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Dining
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thoughts of a regal headdress, or of ship’s rigging; it is a perfect marriage of rugged materiality and refined manipulation. The warmth and immediacy of Grossen’s sculpture proves to be a consistent theme in the Grotta home. Relatively modest in scale but wide open in plan, the architecture is generous to the objects within, imbuing even small ones with a certain monumentality. As Lou likes to point out, the building was conceived around the collection, not the other way around. The aforementioned baskets by Barnes, made by interweaving thick tree bark into irregular lattices, seem almost to be growing up from the floor. Takaezu’s amply proportioned pots seem to move in the opposite direction, with rivers of glaze coursing down their rock-ribbed sides. These works help to draw the visitor in—one feels tugged along by them, and the unforced flow of the floorplan—to a sunken living room, with broad steps leading down. And despite the caliber of the works in the space, this really is a room for living in, not a parlor for display. It is comfortably furnished, with plenty of places to sit and look at the things on view, out at nature’s pageant. I have been lucky enough to visit the Grottas on several occasions and the scenery has always been
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It took over 15 years to convince Toshiko Takaezu to part with one of her favorite pieces (pictured below left), originally thrown when she was teaching at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan. We first fell for it, and thought we had bought it, at a show at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey. When the show was over and we came to pick up our newest Toshiko at her home, she informed us she just couldn’t part with it, for two reasons. One, she was very fond of it and two, reproducing the likes of it didn’t seem possible working with her now-native New Jersey clay and water. At least six times a year, we would visit her home and admire the fabulous fruits of her vegetable garden, take off our shoes as directed at the front door and follow her downstairs to her chaotic, poorly fluorescently lit workspace, to view works in progress, her kiln and many overcrowded shelves of finished work. While Sandy and Toshiko caught up on each other’s latest news and discussed possible purchases, I went to the sink, wet down a rag and worked through a maze of clay, dust-covered inventory to confirm our long-lost favorite piece wasn’t long gone. When I finally found it, I’d wipe off layers of dust, take it outside to the daylight, where I verified how terrific it remained and how much better it would look positioned in our home. Good things can come to
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