Eve Paige Spencer
Born in New York City in on July 5th, 1920 (she celebrated her birthday on July 4th), Eve spent her formative years in Far Rockaway, New York, where she attended Rockaway High with her best friend Cliff Gold and his brother Horace, whom she married in 1940.
Eve's friends in show business encouraged her to seek a career in films, and she was in fact "shopped" by several Hollywood studios as a potential film star. Gary Cooper expressed an interest in having her co-star with him.
The teenage Eve Paige Spencer was the Prima dancer with Billy Rose, and was then the celebrated protege of several modern and tap dancers including Ray Bolger and the Nicolas brothers. She was accepted for three films when pregnancy and the Second World War permanently interrupted her film career. Her close friend Doris Davenport received the film roles in her place. They remained friends throughout their lives, and Eve later helped Doris when she was recovering from a terrible automobile accident.
Eve Paige, the dancer
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Many photos and clippings of Eve as a movie actress and dancer remain in the collection of her son, and are on loan to the museum for this exhibit. She was very glamorous and was well-known in the performance arts. She was often asked at Catskill resorts to dance onstage.
In 1949 the family moved into Stuyvesant Town, a new Metropolitan Life "Dream City" on the east side of lower Manhattan, very close to the famed Greenwich Village. It was on a shopping tour in the West Village in September of 1949 that she met the famed Modernist jeweler, Art Smith, for whom she designed several pieces which became his best-known artwork.
She then went on to become Art Smith's student, learning from him the craft of pierced and shaped silver -- his metal-of-choice. Eve began producing silver jewelry using a special miniature air-acetelyne torch.
She also studied briefly with Ed Weiner and Sam Kramer, but felt they were too limiting, and went on to develop her own unique style and methodology of silversmithing and copper enamel work.
At the same time, she began working with very advanced ceramics and glazes, encouraged by her friends Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston, all of whom were frequent visitors at her apartment and some of whom visited her summer home, the Zena Mill in Woodstock, New York. Many photos still exist of these art celebrities in this pleasant and supportive art community setting.
Eve was very involved in the art community of New York City during the war years and postwar period, from 1941 through 1954, often volunteering her services to help with museum projects at the Modern, including the Children's Art Carnival, which is well-documented in her son's book, At MOMA, which shows many of Eve's contributions to the artistic cultural heritage of New York City.
She placed her son in a very progressive school, Downtown Community School, where he was exposed to the artistic influences of Pete Seeger and many others hired by the school's director, the world-famous educator, Norman Studer.
It was during this same period that Eve, who was assistant editor of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine with her first husband Horace L. Gold, hosted many art celebrities of the period, including Ben Shahn, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. It was John Cage who inspired Eve to have shows of her work at galleries throughout Manhattan. Cage later collaborated on several art exhibits with her son in New York City galleries and in a special hand-produced fine art book called Lectures on Silence.
On a trip to Mexico City in 1953, Eve was fascinated by an exhibition of cloisonne work dating from the 11th to 16th centuries, mostly Spanish. In addition, she encountered an artist there who was willing to show her some of the hidden secrets of enamelware, the foundational basis of cloisonne.
When Eve returned to New York, she began to employ her ceramic kiln for the production of enamelware, but soon found the top-loading kiln too unwieldy for the small pieces, and the firing temperatures too wide for enamel, which requires a small window of critical temperatures and timing.
Continuing to produce ceramics, she dropped the enamal and cloisonne for a while, but after a long and difficult New York State divorce, she relocated to Albany, California, where she was able to set up a smaller front-loading kiln with enough space left over to make a small workshop for silver jewelry and enamelware.
When she was hired as story editor for Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, and several other television shows, she moved to a much smaller space, an apartment on Glenrock Avenue in Westwood Village, Los Angeles, overlooking the UCLA campus.
Here she could not produce artwork; the apartment was just too small to accommodate a studio, and her work did not permit the time to devote private projects such as ceramics, jewelry or enamelware.
Those interests were put aside for several years until she met and married a Son of the Golden West and descendent of the Donner Party and George Platt Spencer who invented Spencerian handwriting, Paul Donner Spencer. George Platt Spencer created the documents on display in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Paul, who was called "Donner" by his family, was then the Marketing Director for Capitol Records, and had signed a number of exciting acts to Capitol, including Nancy Wilson, Bas Sheva, George Shearing, Peggy Lee and others. He was responsible for the Angel label on Capitol, which specialized in classical music. Donner was the son of a radio broadcaster whose station, KWIZ, in Santa Ana, was famous for classical music programming as early as the 1930s.
Together, Donner and Eve set up a small business, Doneve Designs, which produced ceramic giftware for Capitol Records' marketing department. They also developed a special printing technique for oversized books to benefit visually impaired students and printed them for the State of California for about a decade.
They moved from Los Angeles following the acquisition of Capitol Records by EMI Britain, which replaced all the American executives with their own British personnel, leaving Donner out of a job.
In their new Northern California home in Los Altos, Eve had lots of room to set up a separate studio in a large outbuilding. At last she had a luxurious space in which to create her enamels, cloisonne and ceramics, and she immediately joined an artist's co-op in Sunnyvale so she could exhibit her work and hopefully earn some income from it.
Her first show was very successful, largely due to the fact that her husband Donner told Eve's son Jeff to take her to a Japanese restaurant while he re- priced everything in her show. He doubled and tripled the prices she had put on her pieces. She had undervalued everything in order to make sales, but he believed in her ability to get fair prices.
Sure enough, the show sold out, all but one piece, which remains in the collection of her son Jeff, and which is shown in this exhibition.
At this same time, Eve taught copper enameling and cloisonne at UC Santa Cruz. She continued teaching these crafts for several years until the couple moved to their new home in Saratoga, which had been designed and built by the architect responsible for the restoration of nearby Old Town Los Gatos.
When Eve's daughter-in-law gave her winning California lottery ticket to Eve, and Eve's family and a few friends accompanied her to the Big Spin, where they formed a cheering squad -- the first ever seen on the Big Spin -- with the kids' pom-poms that had been left in the van the previous afternoon.
Eve successfully landed the Big Prize, $15 million, which had eluded contestants for several months, building up the the highest prize awarded to date in the California Lottery.
This grand prize enabled Eve, who had been considering selling her beautiful Saratoga home, to fulfill her life's dream of creating her own fully appointed enamelware studio, which she did. In addition to expansion of the enameling studio, Paul Donner Spencer fulfilled his own dream by purchasing two Jaguars, one sedan for family travel, and a 12 cylinder E type sports model for pleasure.
The entire lower floor became her workplace, and she was able to experiment with the medium to her heart's content. She produced hundreds of pieces of enamelware, cloisonne and ceramics, without the need to sell them.
She often gave them as gifts to family and especially to her favorite salespeople at a number of local boutiques and department stores. Most of her production, however, remained with the artist throughout the remainder of her life, and when she designed her own home in Lake Wildwood and then in San Diego, they were part of her home's décor.
Eve was fortunate to be able to produce her art outside the marketplace. It enabled her to be creative without the commercial concerns of so many artists throughout history. She was unconcerned with the art buying public, the art dealers and the art critics, and was now free to explore the unknown realms of her chosen artistic discipline.
Most enamelists are content to be listed among folk artists. Eve was emphatically not, and insisted that her enamelware and cloisonne was absolutely quite apart from the field of folk art.
Many of her post-California-lottery pieces were created specifically for the architectural environment she created for herself with her additional wealth. Her front doors in their 1991 Lake Wildwood home were magnificently tall, cathedral-like heavy wooden forms, clad with smaller square and rectangular enamelware copper plate, to create a profoundly moving effect on the infrequent visitors she hosted from time to time, burdened now with difficult health issues including a successful bout with cancer.
One interviewer following her California Lottery triumph remarked that she was a very lucky woman, to which she responded, "...my luck also includes having cancer, so if you call that lucky, fine."
Because the lottery was a type of gambling income, Eve and Paul now had to lose a certain amount at gambling to offset some of the taxes, so they freqently went to Lake Tahoe both to gamble and to visit with friends who owned and managed the casinos and hotels.
Eve was always accompanied on her gambling junkets by her daughter-in-law Morgan and her son Jeff; often her friends Della Heywood, Jewel McInroy and Lisa Garrison were her constant companions.
Casino people were delighted to see Eve, because she brought fun and sparkle to the tables, and on several occasions, she won the Blackjack championships and was featured on at least one Casino's marketing posters which advertised the winners of their tournaments.
At the end of her life, Eve Paige Spencer was always interested in the creative process and as a member of the Modernist Movement, was immersed in the cultural art of many countries and cultures. Her last home in Rancho Santa Fe near San Diego, made famous in the media by the the infamous Heaven's Gate cult mass suicide in 1997, was a virtual museum of glass cases and exhibition platforms.
She was the last of the early Modernists, passing at the age of 89 the day after Mother's Day, 2009, and her rightful place in art history is assured by the exhibition of this massive collection of her work.
copyright (c) 2010 by Museum of Ancient & Modern Art. No part of this dissertation may be published or otherwise used in any form whether virtual or actual without express written permission of the copyright holders.