Eames: The Architect & the Painter – review

This engrossing documentary recounts through eloquent interviews and fascinating archive footage the joint careers of the charismatic Charles Eames and his wife, Ray. He was an architect who never completed his degree; she gave up a promising future as a painter when they moved from the midwest to California early in the second world war and set up a firm that became an American equivalent of the Bauhaus. Their early wartime work designing splints for the military led to their revolutionary postwar modernist furniture, and up until the late 1970s, they were in the vanguard of every branch of design in America, from film to international exhibitions. A riveting story.