SKUNK

HERE IS AN ANIMAL FORM where I've stopped before adding eyes nose ears to tell you what kind. I stopped because the clay shaped itself into one proud form, and little added ears would have rudely interrupted its rhythm and weakened its message.

GRIZZLY BEAR cut and tailored in one piece... except for his nose.

THEIR FACES ARE BIG like bells, because faces are important and bells are a natural ending for clay. Animals have to end somewhere too, and animals and clay often end the same way... aggressive at the face, retiring at the tail.

ANTEATER her whole body curves downward-her long neck long head long nose long tongue... and out on the end of all these... she catches ants.

WEASEL formed into one long piece as a weasel is. I used a knife to cut him into a weasel's delicacy... to lift him light off his feet.

PORTRAIT HEAD a simple sphere upon which I've built the thin bony ridges of a Scandinavian face Sometimes hair crawls around a face, like bridges.

"There are many ways of working in clay, but here is one where each sculpture happens all at once, out of one damp sheet of clay. You bend the whole piece into structurally rigid forms, as if you were holding a molten sheet of metal which will suddenly cool and set. You push and pull from the inside-squeezing it in here till it bulges out there. You watch textures stretch and shrink as forms curve in and out -fluid and springy-like a rising moving animal. You are capturing and holding the will of clay-like holding the roll of ocean waves or the glitter of changeable taffeta; like catching the soaring of a bird in your hands. For clay is of the earth—of the essence—whatever that means. I can only feel the meaning.
— Lily Saarinen



Northland Center Wall Sculpture, Michigan 1954 by Loraxion ©2009

A gifted and unique artist and sculptor, Lily Saarinen specialized in animal portraits over her long life that she created in a variety of sculptural mediums with an uncommon wit and whimsy coupled with a sophisticated eye. She was equally comfortable working at an intimate scale as many of her figurines demanded as well as working in the broader scale of architectural commissions that were even more demanding. Her modernist pedigree was cultivated on both continents under the tutelage of a number of modern masters but her refreshing sense of color, shape and form with her underlying humanity contrasted rather nicely with the stark forms of modernism.

Her writing for the September 1945 Arts & Architecture magazine simply entitled "Lily Saarinen" included at top reveals a singular wit and good natured humor about the zoology of life and its inhabitants—integrated with a keen knowledge of aesthetic principles and the plasticity of modern sculpture.

Lilian Louisa Swann Saarinen, sculptor and artist, was born in New York City in 1912 to Susan Ridley Sedgwick Swann Hammond and Dr. Arthur Wharton Swann. During her early years, Lily spent her summers in Connecticut studying sculpture and her winters learning to ski with Otto Fürer in St. Anton-Amalberg in Austria. In 1935, Lily illustrated a book titled Picture Book Zoo for the Bronx Zoo and she published the children's book Who Am I? years later. In 1936, she was on the first women's Olympic Ski Team. She studied at the Art Students' League in New York City with Ukrainian avant-garde artist, Alexander Archipenko and, later, with Albert Stewart and Heinz Warneke before moving to Michigan where she studied under sculptor Carl Milles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

The architect Eero Saarinen taught at the Academy and when he met Lily Swann at Cranbrook in 1937, she was glamorous, an established sculptor, former competitive skier, and daughter of a prominent New York family. They married in 1939, and she had a son, Eric in 1941 and a daughter, Susan in 1945.

During her marriage to Eero, Lily participated as a team member of their design group in the competition for the Westward Expansion Memorial, later known as the "Gateway Arch" in St. Louis among others. She also executed several architectural sculpture commissions on her own, such as the Crow Island School reliefs in Winnetka, Illinois; the reliefs at the Post Office in Carlisle, Kentucky; a relief at the Harbor National Bank on Franklin St. Boston, and the Royal Dutch Airlines relief at JFK Airport in New York.

For the Crow Island School, built in 1940, Lily was commissioned by the architectural firm of Perkins, Wheeler, and Will (now the Perkins and Will) to create ceramic sculptures that were incorporated into the walls of the school. These lovely animal sculptures, by the hand of a most gifted ceramic sculptor, appeal to the children and lend an intimate and charming aspect to the simple, broad areas of brick construction. The 23 glazed ceramic plaques that appear both inside and outside the school were fired in Maija Grotell's Cranbrook studio. Marjorie Cast Danforth, a student of Grotell's in 1938, assisted Lily by researching glazes. In the Crow Island lobby are plaques depicting Noah, three pair of animals, and the dove.

In 1945, Lily taught soldiers ceramic sculpture as part of the Red Cross Arts and Skills Unit rehabilitation program. Later she taught at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. Moving to Cambridge Massachusetts, after her divorce from Eero in 1954, she taught at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Her cousin Edie Sedgwick was among her private students studying sculpture in Cambridge in the early 1960s. Edie, the New York City "It Girl", went to class in a grey Mercedes and Lily said of her cousin: "She was very insecure about men, though all the men loved her."

Lily's expertise in animal figuration, brought her a commission for Bagheera, the panther from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Placed in the Boston Public Garden in 1986, it was originally called Night and was the piece that she exhibited in the 1939 World's Fair. In later years, Lily did a number of portraits, among them, one of her dear friend, renown portraitist and painter Gardener Cox.

She was the winner of numerous awards: the A.H. Huntington First Prize, the Rome Collaborative Competition, and the I.B.M. Competition in 1943, among many others.

Lily died in Cohasset, Massachusetts in 1995 at age 83. She is survived by her son Eric, her daughter, Susan and grandchildren Erik and Mark Wilkinson, Evan Sedgwick and Eliot Eames Saarinen and Katrina Bergman Field.

"It isn't like things in the, some artists in the past who would humanize their animals. They didn't give them human eyes and arms and legs, suggested arms and legs and wings. My things are really not trying to make them into people. It's just sort of bringing out the fact that they have feelings, too, and that they are perfectly adorable, anyway, looking. And beautiful, elegant, they are."
—Lily Swann Saarinen


essay by David Curry


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