by Ian Volner
Everything that she did for her children in the years that followed she did not only alone but on one leg. Though she wore a prosthetic limb most of the time, she found it stiff and uncomfortable, and routinely padded it with multiple socks that could quickly become sweaty and dirty. Walking was painful, and fast movement of any kind impossible. She did not greet misfortune gladly—she always acted, Michael said, “as if somebody owed her something”—but neither did she surrender to her husband’s corrosive self-pity.26 Undaunted in the face of her disability, she made it a part of her child-rearing ethic.
Among Michael’s earliest memories was a long trip to St. Louis by train, pressed up against the window, watching the flat expanses of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri roll by. They had traversed the Midwest and crossed the Mississippi to reach the manufacturer of Erma’s preferred prosthesis: she wanted to have a new one fitted and to pick it straight off the line. When they arrived, Erma brought Michael along with her into the warehouse—a bizarrely artificial trophy room, with thousands of plastic arms, legs, and other body parts massed on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. It might sound like a macabre spectacle to which to expose one’s child, but it did not seem so to Erma. For her this was simply another necessity of her condition, and if young Michael didn’t like it, he had best keep his thoughts to himself. Such were her hard-edged lessons in empathy.
There were others. Not long after the operation, Erma attempted to hire someone to help her around the house and placed an ad in the local paper. When the applicant arrived, Michael opened the door and ushered the would-be aide into the modest one-floor house on Indianola. Immediately visible down the length of the hallway, lying in her bedroom, was Erma, still convalescing from the operation and with her amputated leg in full view. A shriek went up from the visitor: “They didn’t tell me there was a sick person here!” Michael remembered her saying. “I’m not going to be in a house with sick people!” And she ran out.27
Erma was shattered; Michael was furious. He wanted his mother to be a happy warrior, to remain the cheerful soul she had been. But attitudes toward the disabled in the 1940s and ’50s were not, in the main, so accepting as they are today, and the expectation that others would view her with either pity or disgust soured Erma’s humor. She was, in her rough way, unashamed of her condition, but her strength sometimes emerged as meanness directed at anyone she didn’t know—at sales clerks and waitresses especially. Awful scenes at department stores were a recurring feature of Michael’s youth.
Still, Erma’s pragmatic, no-nonsense brand of compassion, born of her disability and the reactions of a hostile world, would be key in shaping Michael’s future path. His mother had, after all, been a nurse, and beneath her sometimes brusque exterior remained a desire to ease others’ pain. The variation on the Golden Rule that she presented to her children was an unsentimental, all-American imperative: be of use. It was a lesson Michael internalized early.
HE ALSO, JUST AS EARLY, ran afoul of it. For there was only one thing, from as early as he or anyone who knew him in Broad Ripple Village could recall, that Michael was absolutely certain he wanted to do. It was by no means something that seemed likely, in itself, to satisfy his mother’s strict, utilitarian standard. But it was something he felt compelled to do: he wanted to draw.
Sitting by the window, Erma would look out in muted bemusement as the eight-, nine-, or ten-year-old Michael wandered through the front and back yards and along the sidewalk, drawing everything in sight. Indianola Avenue was lined with tall maples and oaks; overhead the power lines stretched from post to post, bowing deeply in between, and the houses, seen obliquely, produced a muddle of overlaid figures trooping one after another as far as the banks of the White River. Michael took it down as best he could with the pencils and loose-leaf paper his mother allowed him to keep. She could tell he had promise, but the situation was not to her liking. Tom excelled at math and science; why couldn’t Michael be more like his older brother?28
Besides the notebooks, the only real indulgence of Michael’s artistic talent that Erma ever permitted was during a single summer when he was a child, when she signed him up for a painting class at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It lasted one afternoon, and its sole product was a painting of a papier-mâché tiger that Michael had seen in the museum’s collection.29 Years later Ada Louise Huxtable—the New York Times’s first architecture critic (and still the most powerful one in its history)—asked him about his “artistic education,” and he mentioned briefly this one-day intensive seminar in Indianapolis. Huxtable, apparently deeming this a sufficient pedigree, went on to claim in print that Michael Graves was “a painter before he was an architect.”30 No copy of the painting exists to vouch for Michael’s early academic bona fides.
The tiger, however, was all Erma was prepared to tolerate. One day, not long thereafter, she made her feelings plain to her younger son.
“I’m tired of you telling all my friends that you’re going to be an artist,” he remembered her saying. “Unless you’re as good as Picasso, you’ll starve. What you should do is find a life’s work that uses art, but that’s a real profession.”
“Like what?” Michael asked.
“I don’t know. Like engineering, or architecture.”
Unfamiliar with either trade, Michael asked first what engineers do. Erma explained in a hazy way the process of preparing schematic drawings, resolving the technical problems of construction, figuring out how to make buildings stand up, and so forth.
It sounded complicated. “All right then,” said Michael. “I’ll be an architect.”
“But,” Erma pointed out, “I haven’t told you what an architect does yet.”
Michael said he didn’t need to know; he just knew he didn’t want to be an engineer. If he was not to be an artist, he would settle for being an architect.
And that was that.31
THERE WAS AT LEAST one other way in which Erma’s disability was formative in Michael’s development as a designer, however accidentally. On the eve of his mother’s amputation, he went to see her in the hospital. He entered her room to discover a huge dome—a horrible glass vault, used to freeze the leg in preparation for severing it—covering one half of her body. Michael remembered being terrified, not understanding what had happened, who was to blame, or what was going to happen next.
Then and there, his mother pulled him close. “You’ve got to make me a promise,” she whispered. “You will never have cosmetic surgery.”32 This might seem an extraordinary promise to extract from an eleven-year-old boy, in particular one already trembling in fear and confusion. Then again, Erma was no ordinary mother. Michael nodded his assent.
It was, in any event, an easy enough promise to make: What likelihood could the boy possibly foresee of ever wanting to have cosmetic surgery? But even at that tender age, there were already the first faint signs of a condition that would affect Michael for his entire life and shape the way that he—literally and figuratively—viewed the world.
It usually begins in early childhood, so was likely evident by the date of Erma’s amputation. Every now and again, when he looked at objects in the far distance, young Michael’s left eye could be seen to drift slightly, modulating toward the corner farthest from his nose. The problem tends to intensify with age, such that by the time Michael was in his late teens—having never had, as he swore he would not, the surgery that might have corrected it—he had developed a pronounced case of lazy eye. Constant exotropic strabismus, the technical name for the disorder, is one of a number of classifications related to amblyopia, a failure of the eye to communicate with the brain due to neurological factors, resulting in the eye’s physical decentering. The underlying cause of Michael’s was never known, since he never considered an operation on it. He might have pursued a number of alternative therapies, such as wearing an eye patch over his healthy eye to force the skewed one to align properly. He did not.33
The consequences of this decision for Michael’s way of se
eing are difficult to tease out, if only because vision is among the more subjective topics in medicine: one can only see the way one sees, and Michael never had anything with which to contrast his own experience. But some aspects of life with exotropia can be described with certainty.
Michael’s high school graduation photo. His eye defect is clearly visible.
In the normally sighted individual, the world appears monoptically, both eyes being trained on a given object to form a single image. The exotropic viewer, on the other hand, may experience double vision: the object appearing side by side, the strong and the weak eye viewing it independently. But this is rare, at least in those who carry their lazy eye into adulthood. After a certain phase in cognitive development, the brain simply corrects the problem, creating a synthetic image that combines the two discrete perceptions of each eye, with an emphasis on the fully operable one. But it is a unified image very different from that seen by the orthoscopic majority. The image fused together by the brain is flattened, the object’s position relative to those around it being less than perfectly gauged. The downside, as one can imagine, is a general diminution in depth perception, which—even with the corrective lenses that Michael wore to help improve the nearsightedness of the weaker eye—can make it difficult to play sports, to estimate distances, or even (in extreme cases) to tell the difference between a picture of a thing and the thing itself.
The upside, however, is that it can make for great art.34 If the flattened landscape of exotropia sounds a little like a Cubist painting, that is no coincidence: Pablo Picasso, Erma’s model of the financially successful artist, shared with her son an abnormally aligned eye that seems to have played a major part in the early phase of his career. And Picasso wasn’t alone. According to recent research, Rembrandt van Rijn, Marc Chagall, Frank Stella, Alexander Calder, and Edward Hopper are only a few of the startlingly high proportion of prominent artists who exhibited some degree of strabismus. Obviously, merely having the condition is no guarantor of artistic ability. But since the strabismus-affected individual already views his or her environment in something very much like two dimensions, it is that much easier to translate three-dimensional phenomena onto the flat expanse of the canvas: even if the artwork doesn’t betray an explicitly Cubistic quality, there’s one less cognitive leap to overcome. For this reason, art teachers frequently advise their pupils to cover one eye while trying to draw a subject.
One might also speculate as to another explanation, more difficult to pin down, for why art history is so filled with cockeyed geniuses. In the exotropic experience, there may be a degree of difference that lends those artists’ work (to recall the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky) a quality of estrangement. Their perceptive mechanism forever at odds with that of the rest of humankind, lazy-eyed artists reproduce the world in compellingly unfamiliar fashion, creating something that feels like the world as we know it, yet somehow not, as in the world of dreams.
MICHAEL WAS ALWAYS AWARE, at least in the abstract, that his eye played some role in his creative process. “I’m the only artist and architect I know,” he would joke, “who sees the world from a skewed perspective.”35
Not the only one, evidently. But the only one he knew. The consciousness of his condition as a demarcation of difference—of both seeing and being seen differently from those around him—was another element of the condition for Michael, and this too may be symptomatic of strabismus. Almost as important as its perceptive implications are its psychosocial effects. The awareness that others were looking at him strangely, fixated upon that odd eye, never left Michael; years later he would sit in business meetings and watch as a new client first noticed his peculiar gaze and then sat puzzled for the remainder of the session, trying to figure out precisely what Michael was looking at. It gave him, at key moments, the advantage of inscrutability.36
That might not have felt like such a fine thing to an adolescent. Current studies show that the conviction among their peers that children with strabismus are “weird” or “shifty” can lead to isolation and feelings of low self-worth, with ongoing symptoms of social anxiety lasting well into adulthood.37 This too may contribute to the artistic impulse: What is an artist, if not a perpetual outsider? Feeling oneself to be different, one becomes so. Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the most famous intellectual walleye of the twentieth century, might never have become his aloof, confounding self without the aloof, confounding expression that made him seem so from the start. But Michael was not exchanging witticisms with Simone de Beauvoir and the rest at the Café de Flore.
Mike—as he was then universally known—was in Indianapolis in the 1940s: a skinny kid with thick glasses, spiky hair, and a comical, moonlike countenance, charmingly out of sync with the world yet wishing deeply to be as much like everyone else as he could.
Downtown Indianapolis and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument (Bruno Schmitz, 1901), seen at midcentury
IT WAS NOT a place and a time that offered much nourishment to an aspiring young architect. Beyond the determined indifference of his mother and father to what might be deemed “high culture,” Indy was a town of almost unbroken social homogeneity and religiosity, where the local taste rarely exceeded in complexity the local delicacy, the sugar cream pie (ingredients: flour, sugar, butter, vanilla, and cream). Even in 1944, in the middle of the Second World War, the city went solidly for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey.
“I wasn’t exposed to much of anything as a kid that might have made me want to be an artist or an architect,” Michael later said, although there were buildings of note in the city.38 Indianapolis had a library designed by the great early twentieth-century American architect Paul Philippe Cret, a stately affair with a columned porch in front and a triangular pediment above. Cret (pronounced “cray”) was an exponent of a rather harsh, reduced form of classicism, his Beaux Arts training hardened by a distinctly American sobriety. Unhappily for him, the approach proved popular with the German architect Albert Speer in the 1930s, who drew on Cret’s work for his buildings for the Nazi regime.39
The city also had a World War Memorial, a heavy, high-shouldered building, tomblike and mysterious, and Michael spent much of his childhood pining to get inside of it. He never did—it was never open to the public—and the fascination may have resurfaced in his later attraction to the work of the eighteenth-century Frenchman Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, which the memorial resembled slightly in its blocky simplicity and exaggerated proportions.40
The memorial and library were part of a monumental corridor in the middle of downtown Indianapolis that resembled, on a smaller scale and with slightly less formal organization, the National Mall in Washington, DC. This was no coincidence: the city was first designed by an associate of Pierre L’Enfant, the man who drew up the original scheme for the country’s new capital in the 1780s. Like Washington, Indianapolis is laid out on a radial plan, with diagonal streets converging on a large circle in the center of town, which punctuates the southern end of the corridor that includes the World War Memorial and library. And in the very middle of that circle is an obelisk—a looming pseudo-Egyptian tower, not dissimilar from the Washington Monument—surrounded by decorative sculptural groups and encircled by staircases. Dedicated to the dead of the Spanish-American War, it is known as the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.
Visitors were permitted to walk to the top of the obelisk, climbing 284 feet to take in a sweeping view of the whole of Indianapolis stretching out in perfect flatness in all directions. Here at a glance was the entire terra cognita of the first eighteen years of Michael’s life: to the north, Broad Ripple Village and its adjacent suburbs, Graves territory since the days of his great-grandfather T. S.; below, Downtown, a conventional business district with a few fine specimens of American vernacular buildings (but nothing particularly stirring to Mike); and in the far southwest, the stockyards, much diminished from their early-century peak but still very much in operation.
There, intriguingly, was a piece of a
rchitecture that had stuck in the mind of the young designer. Every now and again, when Bud was in a more accommodating and less dissolute mood, he’d take his younger son to the stockyards with him. High above the pens, there was a second floor, a series of elevated catwalks crisscrossing the airy void. The slaughterhouse owners would come out from the city to negotiate purchases with Mike’s father; standing in their suits and ties, they would remain well above the muck, looking down at the livestock below, with Michael standing alongside them. The catwalks were just simple planks of wood, but the future architect never forgot the feeling of that gridded system suspended in air. Everything, it seemed to him, had a grandeur to it, a feeling of importance—the light streaming down from above, the solemn businessmen, and his father below, jumping athletically from aisle to aisle.
Decades later, when Michael first saw the famous Imaginary Prison drawings by the eighteenth-century draftsman Giovanni Battista Piranesi, his first thought was: “I’ve been here.”41 The interweaving wooden structures, the game they played between transparency and opacity, the sense of an ordered system interposing itself on the abstraction of space: the boy could not have articulated it at the time, but the stockyards were his first encounter with that mysterious sensation—that electrification of the subconscious—that certain places and forms would always induce in him. Years later he returned to Indianapolis and went looking for the building, only to find it had been torn down.42 No photographs survive to show what, exactly, Michael Graves’s first authentic architectural experience was like.
His father’s business was the occasion for another encounter, equally unintentional, that would presage a rather different aspect of Michael’s architectural development. As he related decades later to his colleague Peter Waldman, Bud once took him into town to show him the office where he and all the Graveses past had sorted out their receipts and shipping orders. His father gestured up to the old building, trying to point out the window next to which he kept his own desk. He couldn’t find it: all the floors were too alike. The moment stayed with Michael long after. “Architecture,” he told Waldman, “is responsible for making a place so that a father can tell his son where he works.”43 For Michael, understanding a building would always be as important as how it made him feel.