Saarinen, Lilian Swann, 1912-1995

Lilian Louisa Swann Saarinen (April 17, 1912 – May 22, 1995) was an American sculptor, artist, and writer. She was the first wife of Finnish-American architect and industrial designer Eero Saarinen, with whom she sometimes collaborated. She was born in New York City to Dr. Arthur Wharton Swann and his wife Susan Ridley Sedgwick. She attended Miss Chapin's School in Manhattan, and spent her summers studying sculpture in Connecticut.[2] She first seriously studied art at the Art Students League of New York with Alexander Archipenko, and later with Albert Stewart, Heinz Warneke, and Brenda Putnam.[2] She moved to Michigan where she studied under Carl Milles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.[3]

During her teenage years, she spent her winters learning to ski with Otto Fürer in St. Anton am Arlberg in Austria. She was an alternate on the first U.S. Women's alpine ski team at the 1936 Winter Olympics.[2] She met Eero Saarinen at Cranbrook Academy, where his father, architect Eliel Saarinen, was a faculty member. She married Eero on June 10, 1939, and they had two children: Eric Saarinen, born 1942, and Susan Saarinen, born 1945. They divorced in 1954, and she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.[4] She contributed illustrations to magazines such as Child Life, Interiors, and Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly. In 1935 she illustrated a children's book for the Bronx Zoo, Picture Book Zoo.[5] In 1946 she wrote and illustrated the children's book Who Am I?[6]

Saarinen's early sculpture commissions included: 23 glazed terra cotta reliefs (most of animals) at the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, 1938, Eliel Saarinen, architect;[7] reliefs at the U.S. post office in Carlisle, Kentucky; and a terra cotta relief, Waiting for the Mail (1941), at the U.S. post office in Bloomfield, Indiana (Missing as of 2016[8]).[9][10] She frequently supplied "ceramic embellishments" for her husband's architectural projects.[11]


Bagheera Fountain at Boston Public Garden
She exhibited the sculpture Night (now called Bagheera) at the 1939 World's Fair. It illustrates a scene from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book—the panther Bagheera hunting an owl by night.[12] Placed in the Boston Public Garden in 1986,[13] it is a feature of the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.[14]

She was part of her husband's design team that won the 1947 national competition to design the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri at the Gateway Arch National Park. Her bas-relief panels of the Mississippi River were eliminated from the final design.[2]

She specialized in animal portraits. Among these were the Royal Dutch Airlines sculpture at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City; and Screaming Eagle (1951) at the Federal Reserve Bank Building Annex in Detroit, Michigan. The latter piece, designed at the request of architect Minoru Yamasaki, is an abstract American bald eagle constructed of welded brass rods.[15] She created the Fountain of Noah (1954) at the Northland Center, a shopping mall in Southfield, Michigan; interior sculpture at the Toffenetti Restaurant in Chicago, Illinois; and a mural of Boston Harbor with glazed terra cotta reliefs of sea creatures (1960s) at the Harbor National Bank on Franklin Street in Boston, Massachusetts.[2] In later years, she modeled a number of portrait heads, among them that of her friend Gardner Cox (1967).[16][17]

In 1945, as part of the Red Cross Arts and Skills Unit rehabilitation program, she taught returning soldiers to model and fire ceramic sculpture. Later she taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her cousin, socialite and actress Edie Sedgwick, was one of her private students.[18]

She exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1945 to 1947.[19] She was the winner of several awards: the A.H. Huntington First Prize, the Rome Collaborative Competition (1939), and the I.B.M. Competition (1943), among others.

Death
On May 22, 1995, Saarinen died in Cohasset, Massachusetts at the age of 83. She is survived by son Eric Saarinen, daughter Susan Saarinen, and grandchildren Erik and Mark Wilkinson, Evan Sedgwick Saarinen, Eliot Eames Saarinen and Katrina Bergman Field.

Cambridge artist and sculptor, Lilian Swann Saarinen (1912-1995), studied at the Art Students League with Alexander Archipenko in 1928, and later with Albert Stewart and Heninz Warneke from 1934-1936, before moving to Michigan where she studied with Carl Milles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1936-1940. Saarinen was an accomplished skier and a member of the 1936 US Olympic ski team.
At Cranbrook, Swann met architect Eero Saarinen, whom she married in 1939. She subsequently worked with Saarinen's design group on a variety of projects, including the Westward Expansion Memorial, which later became known as the "Gateway Arch" in St. Louis. Lilian and Eero had a son, Eric, and a daughter, Susie, before divorcing in 1953.
Saarinen, who had developed an affinity for drawing animals in childhood, specialized in animal portraits in a variety of sculptural media. In 1939, she exhibited her sculpture Night, which depicted Bagheera the panther from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, at the World's Fair. The sculpture was placed in the Boston Public Garden in 1986. In the 1930s and 1940s Saarinen was commissioned to work on a variety of architectural projects, including reliefs for post offices in Bloomfield, Indiana, Carlisle, Kentucky, and Evanston, Illinois, and the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois. She also executed commissions for the Harbor National Bank in Boston, KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) at JFK Airport, the Northland shopping Center in Detroit Michigan, and Toffenetti's Restaurant in Chicago.
Saarinen was a contributing author and illustrator for a variety of publications, including Child Life, Interiors and Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly. In 1935 she illustrated Picture Book Zoo for the Bronx Zoo and in 1946 Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc. published Who Am I?, a children's book which Saarinen wrote and illustrated.
Saarinen taught ceramic sculpture to soldiers for the Red Cross Arts and Skills Unit rehabilitation program in 1945, served on the Visiting Committee to the Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1959-1964, where she taught ceramics, and later taught a course entitled "The Language of Clay" at the Cambridge Art Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of Saarinen's private students at Cambridge was her cousin, Edie Sedgwick.
Saarinen died in Cohasset, Massachusetts, in 1995 at the age of 83.