The city was Paul Evans’ primary artistic metaphor. And for good reason: though his busy shop and showroom were located in pastoral New Hope, Pennsylvania, there was always something cosmopolitan about his designs. Unlike his peers in the studio furniture movement, Evans worked primarily in metal, and he ran a big team. He was the ideas man, leaving the welding and other technical execution to his trusty foreman Dorsey Reading and a rotating cast of assistants. Yet there was more to Evans’ sophistication than this. You can see, in his work, influences from contemporary sculpture – from Rauschenberg to David Smith – as well as the Art Deco era, and of course, the architecture of the city itself.
All these adjacencies are evident in this rare Skyline sideboard. It was made at an especially generative moment in Evans’ career, when he was improvising on the forged-front style that had established his reputation. He had unveiled his Argente pieces in 1965 (the same year that the Museum of Modern Art staged its Responsive Eye show, perhaps accounting for the Op Art inflection of that new line). A few years later, in 1970 he would launch the Cityscape collection, with its neo-Cubist mirrored facets. Skyline was not developed into a series in the same way, but should be positioned alongside these major developments. Evans exploited the basic premise – a façade of façades – to motivate strong contrasts in surface treatments, an effect somewhat reminiscent of the cityscape paintings of Paul Klee. Rooflines chart a rhythmic silhouette along the top. It works brilliantly as both image and object: a little stage set, requiring no further action to achieve its theatrical effect.
GLENN ADAMSON
