Lilian Swann Saarinen
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Lilian Louisa Swann Saarinen (1912-1995) was a sculptor and artist, and wife of architect and industrial designer Eero Saarinen. “Lily” was born in New York City to Susan Ridley Sedgwick Swann Hammond and Dr. Arthur Wharton Swann. She studied at the Art Students’ League of NYC with Alexander Archipenko and, later, with Albert Stewart and Heinz Warneke before moving to Michigan where she studied under Carl Milles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She married Saarinen, whom she met at Cranbrook, in 1939, moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts after their divorce in 1951.
During her early years, Lily spent her summers in Connecticut studying sculpture, and her winters learning to ski with Otto Fürer in St. Anton-Amalberg in Austria. In 1936, she was on the first women’s Olympic Ski Team.
In 1935, Lily illustrated a book called Picture Book Zoo for the Bronx Zoo, and in 1946 she published the children’s book Who Am I?
Lily and Eero had two children: Eric Saarinen, born in 1942, and Susan Saarinen, born in 1945. During her marriage to Eero, Lily participated as a team member of their design group, in the competition for the Westward Expansion Memorial, later known as the “Gateway Arch” in St. Louis. Among them were the Crow Island School reliefs in Winnetka, IL 1938; the reliefs at the Post Office in Carlisle, KY; a sculpture for the Royal Dutch Airlines at JFK Airport in NYC, and a relief at the Harbor National Bank on Franklin St. in Boston.
She also designed the "Screaming Eagle" sculpture for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Detroit Branch at the request of Minoru Yamasaki. This piece is constructed of brass and mosaic tile, measuring four feet by four and a half feet as a contemporary version of the traditional American Bald Eagle.
Lily was the winner of several awards: the A.H. Huntington First Prize, the Rome Collaborative Competition, and the I.B.M. Competition in 1943, among others.
In 1945, Lily taught soldiers ceramic sculpture as part of the Red Cross Arts and Skills Unit rehabilitation program. Later she taught at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cousin Edie Sedgwick was one among her private students in Cambridge.
Lily specialized in animal portraits, and her work "Bagheera", illustrates a scene from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Placed in the Boston Public Garden in 1986, it was originally called "Night" and was the piece that she exhibited in the 1939 World's Fair. In later years, Lily did a number of portraits, among them, one of her dear friend, Gardener Cox.
Lily died in Cohasset, Massachusetts in 1995. She is survived by her son Eric Saarinen, her daughter, Susan Saarinen, and grandchildren Erik and Mark Wilkinson, Evan Sedgwick Saarinen, Eliot Eames Saarinen and Katrina Bergman Field.
Footnotes:
Photo comes from subject’s professional file, courtesy of Susan Saarinen.
Women created six of the fourteen sculptures in the Boston Public Garden. Patti Cassidy
Gardner’s portraits include those of Earl Warren, Robert Frost, Robert F. Kennedy, Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk. In 1978, his portrait of Henry A. Kissinger, commissioned for exhibition in the State Department, created a stir when it was rejected on the ground that it didn't quite capture Mr. Kissinger. Yankee Magazine, 1978, “Oh My God, Do I look Like That?” by Austin Stevens.
Archives of American Art: Oral History Interview with Lilian Swann Saarinen 1976-1981.