A photograph of the living room of the Eames house in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles has proven rather puzzling to historians of design. It depicts the famous Case Study House as full of exotic collectibles. Hopi kachina dolls, seashells, craft objects, silk textiles from Nepal and Thailand, and elaborately patterned rugs from Mexico and India all crowd and assault their modernist frame. Beatriz Colomina has commented on this "kaleidoscopic excess of objects" in the Eames house, and attributed it to Ray in particular, described elsewhere as a "sublime pack rat" who saved and collected everything.1 I In the 1990S, the director of the Vitra Design Museum made a similar observation upon visiting the Eames office: "It seemed that I was being whisked into a world full of images from India, and at times into a circus."2 Others have expressed their unease with this excess and the difficulty of assimilating this side of the Eameses into their identities as masters of mid-century modernism.3 How, then, should we understand this picture? Is it yet another scene of modernism's insatiable consumption of the non-West, a photograph that belongs to the same family of images as the picture of tribal artifacts in Picasso's studio? Or is it an expression of their postwar liberalism, an image consistent with the Eameses as advocates of a cosmopolitan and more "humane modernism?"4

• 1. Quoted phrases are from Beatriz Colomina, "Reflections on the Eames House," and Joseph Giovannini, "The Office of Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser: The Material Trail," in The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, ed. Donald Albrecht (New York: Harry Abrams, 1997), 144 and 45, respectively.
• 2. Alexander von Vegesack, preface, The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, 7.
• 3. See for example Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 183.
• 4. Donald Albrecht, introduction, The Work of Charles and RayEames, 16.