Diane Erickson Essay
from Robert Erickson: The Lens of the Total Designer (Stephen Daiter Gallery, 2003)

Robert Erickson was born in 1917 in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father was in the printing trade and his mother was a pianist and composer. As a young man he had developed a broad range of interests, including nature, science, mathematics, music, art, and languages, all of which he later focused on at the university level.  At one point Erickson planned to become a forester, but as time passed he was increasingly drawn toward music and the visual arts. He happened across a flyer describing the unusual curriculum at the Institute of Design (then still the School of Design), - a holistic approach to the unity of the arts and sciences in the service of humanity - and moved to Chicago in 1943.

From 1943 to 1948, Erickson became deeply involved in I.D. activities, and embarked on a tailor-made degree program created by Moholy.  He attended every class Moholy offered, including painting, photography, motion pictures, and occupational therapy.  Erickson thoroughly absorbed the philosophies and practical approaches of both the regular faculty and the extraordinary guest lecturers. Their insights helped him integrate his varied interests and kaleidoscopic views into a useful synthesis, a whole, while still encouraging the diverse talents that defined him.

While still a student at the I.D. Erickson taught adult drawing and painting classes privately. He also became the art instructor and Unified Arts Department Chairman at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. At Lab he greatly expanded the curriculum to embrace a very wide range of the arts, and pioneered the teaching of photography to teenagers.  Moholy was impressed. In 1945 he appointed Erickson to the important position of director of children’s classes.  Moholy-Nagy’s daughters, Hattula and Claudia (Buschi), were two of Erickson’s first I.D. students.  Erickson and Moholy shared a strong conviction about the importance of passing on Bauhaus principles to the coming generations.

Moholy’s death in 1946 devastated Erickson. They had been close colleagues and friends, and Erickson felt he was one of only a few who could effectively communicate Moholy’s vision to others. Erickson dedicated much of the rest of his life to teaching and to the continuance of Moholy’s educational principles.  Erickson had worked with and befriended many people at the I.D. throughout the years, including photographers Frank Sokolik, Nathan Lerner, and Harry Callahan, but his closest bond was always with Moholy.

Moholy chose images of Erickson’s for inclusion in his now classic treatise on art, design, and education – Vision In Motion (posthumously published in 1947).  Erickson himself wrote and illustrated articles on art and education for various publications. During this time Erickson was also constantly working and experimenting, producing his own art for exhibit - including photography, sculpture, painting, and drawing - as well as designs for jewelry, toys and furniture. In 1946 Erickson, who had long studied voice, performed songs by Arnold Schoenberg for the composer and his wife in Chicago. They were enthralled with the private concert and remained in touch with Erickson.  In the late 1940’s, Erickson team-taught courses on jazz, first with Langston Hughes and then with S. I. Hayakawa. Later Erickson exchanged ideas with Buckminster Fuller and they  developed a friendship for life.  From 1953 to 1960 Erickson taught arts and crafts at Bruno Bettelheim’s request at his Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago.

During all this activity Erickson always found time for photography and his cameras, many of which he designed, constructed, and modified. By 1962, Erickson remarked, The camera has replaced the sketch pencil in my own visual search for the beautiful.                        

Erickson’s photographic search for the beautiful embraced Chicago in a ceaseless passion for its interpretative possibilities.  Using a variety of cameras, including one with a homemade kaleidoscopic lens extension, Erickson redefined powerful bridges, pedestrians, elegant church windows, desolated apartment buildings, and downtown storefronts. There were many nights Mrs. Erickson remembers accompanying her husband as he haunted the city’s nocturnal landscape, searching for the proper angles and lighting to capture something fresh about the Merchandise Mart or the bridges over the Chicago River. He was an excellent printer and – always the educator  - kept careful technical notes on the versos of his images.  Erickson had an affectionate eye for his human subjects, and crafted strong and beautiful documentary portraits of life in the city streets.  He also expressed the human form as pure visual experiments, abstract and dynamic. The experiment, the process, the doing, – that was what mattered most. He manipulated light, design, exposure, development, and often the objects/subjects themselves, resulting in striking and thought provoking photograms, photographs, and photomontages. This playful artist and tireless scientist continually expanded his own visual sensibility in an effort to show others by example, how to see beyond.  

Robert Erickson continued his formal teaching until 1978, when illness forced him to retire.  His mind’s eye remained active, however. His work has been exhibited in a number of Bauhaus/I.D. related shows, including the 2002 landmark exhibition “Taken by Design,” organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.  Erickson’s photography is included in the A.I.C.’s permanent collection as well as that of the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin.  

Erickson died in Chicago in 1991. Both his art and his philosophy remain – in countless images and objects of beauty and significance – and in the spirits of his innumerable students who did learn to see beyond.

© Diane Erickson, 2003