Edgar Miller has been called the forgotten man of Chicago art. But with the new exhibit Edgar Miller Anti-Modern, 1917–1967 at the DePaul Museum of Art in Lincoln Park, he should be forgotten no longer. Curated by Dr. Marin R. Sullivan and organized by the DePaul Art Museum as part of Art Design Chicago, this first major exhibition of Miller’s work is divided into three rooms on the first floor and a small exhibit upstairs. It offers a selection of his larger body of work, including parts of murals, benches, photographs, architectural fragments, sketches, illustrations, woodblock prints, ceramic plates, stained glass windows, and various ephemera such as menus, placemats, and matchbooks.
The ultimate craftsman, Edgar Miller was a major figure on the local art scene in his day. He worked in wood, linoleum, fabric, and stained glass. He drew, painted, and sculpted. He was an illustrator and graphic designer. His clients included Container Corporation of America and Lakeside Press. Marshall Field & Company commissioned Miller to produce artwork for their catalogs, ads, and their in-house magazine, “Fashions of the Hour.” Early on in his career, he even created product packaging for Bauer & Black Baby Talc and Baby Soap.
Born in 1899, Miller arrived in Chicago from his native Idaho in 1917. Initially staying at Jane Addams’ Hull House, he attended the School of the Art Institute and although he would later teach there––intermittently––he left before graduating, over a dispute with the administration, and so was essentially self-taught. His first job was as an apprentice in the design studio of Alfonso Iannelli. Having a natural affinity for traditional crafts and an appreciation of the past, it was while at the Art Institute that he became enchanted with illuminated manuscripts and stained glass. He practiced what I like to call modern medievalism. One particularly striking example of this on display at DePaul is a geometric woodblock print illustration, taken from the pages of a stained-glass booklet, of a bearded medieval knight, a crown on his head.
By fusing high and low art, Miller pioneered what is now called adaptive reuse, recycling and repurposing found objects—brick, stone, tile, glass, steel--and incorporating them into his work. He was known for his various collaborations with other artists (Jesus Silva Torres), architects (Andrew Rebori, Howard Van Doren Shaw, Holabird and Root), and sculptors (Alfonso Iannelli) as well as his own sister, Hester Miller Murray. But perhaps his best-known collaboration was with Sol Kogen. Miller and Kogen revamped old buildings that they called “handmade homes,” designed to be affordable dwellings for artists. They still exist: the Carl Street Studios at 155 W. Burton Place and Kogen-Miller Studios at 1734 N. Wells Street—both in Old Town.
Miller combined elements of the mainstream and the avant-garde. Living and working in the bohemian neighborhood that was once called Towertown (a much better name than the bland Near North Side, as it is known today), he frequented Chicago’s premier bohemian hangout at the time, the Dill (or Dil) Pickle Club, a hybrid coffeehouse, cabaret, theater, and lecture hall located on Tooker Place, an alley near the Newberry Library. He completed two murals for the club and designed the Dill Pickle Press, the Pickle’s in-house publication. In the 1920s, he opened his own art gallery, the House at the End of the Street, at 19 W. Pearson. On display under glass are covers and editions of the various magazines he worked on--Poetry and the Dil Pickler––along with a 1923 ad of up-and-coming artists called “The Parade of Chicago Artists” by the Romanian-born Emil Armin that appeared in the Chicago Literary Times, a short-lived magazine co-founded by Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim. Look carefully at the center of the ad and you will see Miller himself, the “blonde boy Michelangelo.”
In 1934, the Tavern Club commissioned Miller to create a series of murals for its main dining room with its theme of “Love through the Ages.” The exhibit features a selection of panels from the mural that depicts images from the Mesozoic epoch to the Space Age, history overlapping from one era to another, as well as renderings of historic figures (Henry XIII) and historic couples (John Smith and Pocahontas). In my view, the most disturbing section is the politically charged “The Rape of Peace,” which presents various fascists—Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Chiang Kai-shek, Franco, Mussolini––attempting to assault a bound and gagged nude woman.
In the late 1930s, the owners of Normandy House, a rustic French restaurant across from the Water Tower at 800 Tower Court, asked Miller to design the restaurant’s interior. Like other artists around the world (Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow comes to mind), Miller produced a total work of art for his client. And in exchange, he and his family were allowed to live above the two-story restaurant.
Miller not only designed Normandy House’s long, hard-carved wooden benches—one of which is on display in Room 2—but also the restaurant’s menus, placemats, and matchbooks, and even the staff’s costumes. He also designed the restaurant’s wallpaper, tablecloths, stained glass, and ceramic reliefs as well as the Black Sheep Bar, located in the restaurant’s basement (Edgar’s brother, Frank, was a bartender at the Black Sheep and designed the bar’s ashtray). The Black Sheep Bar sign hangs above the entrance to Room 3. Unfortunately, Normandy House was razed in 1959. (The exhibit features a 19-minute 16mm color film of the demolition by the Harvey Wrecking Company. It’s well worth watching as a reminder of what was lost.)
Miller had a soft spot for animals: all kinds of animals from lions to mice, hedgehogs and zebras. Along with Andrew Rebori, he created a map of Brookfield Zoo, printed and distributed through the Works Progress Administration (WPA). My favorite image of his menagerie of creatures in the show is his vivid and vibrant Chickens. Miller also created handmade Christmas cards for family, friends, and clients.
After a long life, Miller died at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston in June 1993. He was 93.
Why has Miller’s work been overlooked for so long? Richard Cahan, author of Edgar Miller and the Handmade Home, maintains it was because he did not follow any particular style or tradition. “And because his art was meant to hang not in museums but in the homes he created.”
The DePaul exhibition goes a long way to correct that oversight.
Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1917–1967 runs through February 23, 2025, at the DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton Ave. Museum hours are Wednesday-Thursday, 11am-7pm; Friday-Sunday, 11am-5pm. Closed Monday-Tuesday. Free admission.
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