As a part of Cranbrook Archives architectural slide collection*, this image shows Cranbrook House’s sunken garden in full bloom in 2003. If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by the gardens this summer – with new patterns and plants, they are in full bloom and open for visitors!
The sunken garden at Cranbrook House in full bloom, 2003. Balthazar Korab, Cranbrook Archives.
It has been a crazy few weeks at the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research – we mounted our two exhibitions at the Cranbrook Art Museum and helped CAM celebrate the opening of the summer museum season with the blockbuster Michigan Modern show. What that means now is that we’ve all got celebratory parties and vacation on the brain, and what better way to celebrate a museum success than with evidence of the parties of the past?
“Come as a Song” party, 1942. Cranbrook Archives.
This photo, taken in March of 1942, captures Harry Bertoia (far right) and Brigitta Valentiner (middle) with an unidentified student (left, and conveniently marked by a Joker card costume). These three costumed young people are attending the “Come as a Song” party, one of the many themed get-togethers hosted at the Academy in the mid-century period.
Harry Bertoia, of course, went on to become a sculptor and furniture designer. Two years after this photo was taken, Harry and Brigitta Valentiner, dressed here as a young maid, married. A Detroit native and a published author, Valentiner was the daughter of Wilhelm Valentiner, the Detroit Institute of Art’s legendary director from 1924 to 1945.
Welcome to the first ever Kitchen Sink caption contest! This historic photograph features Bud West, a Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate and painting instructor at Kingswood, viewing an exhibition of David Berger’s work mounted at Kingswood in 1957. As historians, we would never dare to presume what he’s thinking – which just means that we need you to do it for us! Leave us your entries in the comments, and the winning caption (chosen by an extraordinarily scientific system of “whatever makes us laugh the most”) might just make it into a future Photo Friday post!*
And if you’re interested in painting at Cranbrook in the mid-century period, be sure to visit Cranbrook Art Museum to see the upcoming exhibition What to Paint and Why: Modern Painters at Cranbrook, 1936-1974. Curated by Chad Alligood, the art museum’s 2012-2013 Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow, the exhibition opens June 14.
* Be sure to include a name (real or fake) that we can use to identify your entry!
Students at the Cranbrook School Soda Fountain, May 1955. Historic Photograph Collection, Cranbrook Archives.
We were all set to write something pithy and charming about boarding school life and 1950s Cranbrook, but let’s be serious: it’s Friday, and we all wish there was still a soda fountain on campus. Who wants to build one?
P.S. stop by the Cranbrook Archives reading room sometime if you want to see one of those original Cranbrook School pennants still in action!
Maija Grotell and Nelly Beveridge at work on the base of a fountain, 1940. Richard P. Raseman, Historical Photograph Collection, Cranbrook Archives.
Finnish-born ceramicist Maija Grotell served as the head of the Ceramics Department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1938 to 1966. Here, she works on the base of a fountain with student Nelly Beveridge. Beveridge played many roles on campus, serving as a companion and nurse to George and Ellen Booth in their later years even as she completed her studies at the Academy.
Lake Jonah, 1953. Cranbrook Archives.
With the start of May, spring has finally arrived at Cranbrook. Flowers bloom, warm breezes sweep through the hills, and the various campus lakes look more and more inviting with each passing day. Swimming in Lake Jonah is strictly forbidden, of course, but once upon a time the lake functioned as the campus swimming pool. Here, students at the 1953 Cranbrook Academy of Art Summer Institute learn to swim in Lake Jonah, while in the background other students contemplate the possibility of canoeing.
Workmen spray down the McMath Planetarium dome while under construction at the Cranbrook Institute of Science. 1955. Cranbrook Archives.
The workmen who built the McMath Planetarium at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in the 1950s must have been circus performers as well as skilled craftsmen. Here they balance on plywood platforms, managing a high-pressure hose as they perch above the nearly-completed dome. The planetarium, which opened in 1955, has now been expanded into the Acheson Planetarium and includes research resources as well as visitor viewing opportunities.
Coppersmith’s shop, Cranbrook, England. July, 1901. Henry Wood Booth Papers, Cranbrook Archives.
In 1901, Henry Wood Booth, Cranbrook founder George Gough Booth’s father, took this photograph of the shop in Cranbrook, Kent, where his own father had worked as a coppersmith before moving to Canada with his young family. A handwritten note on the back of the photograph, which is held in the Henry Wood Booth Papers at the Cranbrook Archives, explains that the copper tea kettle hanging from the door was made by Henry’s grandfather (the original George Booth), who also made his trade as a coppersmith. Three generations (and a whole lot of people named Booth) later, George Booth’s great-great-grandson George Gough Booth would build an entire campus around the idea of promoting the applied arts, naming it “Cranbrook” in honor of this town and community.
Cranbrook Academy of Art student Walter Hickey’s model for a proposed development for the Detroit waterfront, 1935. Cranbrook Archives.
You know it’s April at the Cranbrook Art Museum when the building is overrun by graduate students from the Academy of Art, frantically putting together their final projects for the Graduate Degree Exhibition. While the degree show (opening this year on April 22 and running until May 12) is a longtime tradition at Cranbrook (staged in some iteration since 1940!), graduate theses date back to 1943— the first year the Academy was accredited as a degree-granting institution. In 1935 Walter Hickey created this model as part of a larger project to redesign the Detroit waterfront helmed by Cranbrook Academy of Art director and famed architect Eliel Saarinen.
During a visit to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1987, the legendary artist and social activist Keith Haring took a break to get back to basics and teach Brookside 5th graders a bit about art. September, 1987. Cranbrook Archives.
Cranbrook Kitchen Sink 