Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern

In a 1932 profile on Edgar Miller, architecture critic Earl H. Reed Jr. wrote:

A new luminary has risen in American decorative art. Each fresh product of Edgar Miller, designer-craftsman, of Chicago, is proof of this. Signs of an exceptional creative versatility abound in the Carl Street courtyard where his workshop is located. Pavements of marble fragments, a colorful door engraved with Miller-esques—glamorous races of super-beings, birds, beasts, fishes, and growing things miraculously inhabiting his creations, glimpses of a new sort of brilliant leaded glass whose geometry weds it to its setting, ingeniously carved wood; all these delight the eyes of any who enter this abode of arts.¹

Reed went on to describe Miller as a “genial, gentle, modest, and co-operatively inclined” artist who “labors hard and incessantly with an inner satisfaction.” Miller was indeed a tremendously prolific, resourceful, and imaginative creative practitioner, active mostly in Chicago from 1917, when he arrived in the city as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), through the late 1960s, when he relocated to Florida.

Miller drew, painted, printed, and sculpted. He utilized a seemingly endless array of materials and was always mastering a new technique—carving in wood and linoleum; cutting lead sheets; composing complex arrangements of stained glass and tiles; casting in concrete, plaster, and gypsum; designing wallpaper; and making batik or hand-printed textiles. Miller was a sought-after illustrator and graphic designer, working for clients like Container Corporation of America, Marshall Field & Company, and Lakeside Press. He collaborated with architects and helped transform preexisting buildings in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago into artist studio complexes, sometimes called “handmade homes.” Throughout his career, Miller intersected with a broad range of communities, ideologies, disciplines, and fields. He was both a self-taught, avant-garde artist who flourished in the bohemian enclaves of Towertown, and an SAIC-trained practitioner who worked and cultivated meaningful, long-lasting relationships with Chicago’s cultural establishment.

Embedded in Reed’s description of this multifaceted artist, however, are also the reasons that such a well-connected, well-documented, and well-meaning artist, who left an indelible mark on the city of Chicago, has become something of a forgotten figure. As the critic suggested, Miller was an unpretentious, enthusiastic collaborator who fluidly moved across the fine, commercial, and applied arts—all qualities that run counter to established art historical narratives that privilege the solitary modernist genius who creates art solely for art’s sake. Miller began his career at a moment of great upheaval, both within the history of art in the United States and within the cultural history of Chicago. Modern art in the city was still nascent. The controversial Armory Show opened at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in 1913, and notable institutions like the Renaissance Society and the Arts Club of Chicago opened to exhibit modern art a couple of years later.²

As he would do throughout his career, Miller fluidly navigated the burgeoning contemporary art scene of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. He never exclusively belonged to any movement, group, or theoretical approach; nor was he overly concerned with labels, titles, or established boundaries. Miller’s time at SAIC was fraught but certainly exposed him to the debates of modernism. Encounters with faculty like George Bellows, who was a visiting artist at the school, proved formative, but as Miller stated of his time there, “I was conspicuously absent—I wasn’t a good student.” However, his quick departure from the school in 1919 was also spurred by unrest among some students over what they perceived as SAIC’s outdated curatorial practices and pedagogy. Perhaps ironically, or at least reflective of the quickly changing cultural currents in the city during the interwar years, Miller would soon after return as an instructor at SAIC and frequently exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions at AIC.³

Looking back through the copious contemporary criticism and press coverage of Miller during his time in Chicago, he is largely lauded as a modern innovator, and certainly his involvement in bohemian activities in the near north neighborhoods of the city during the early years of his career supports such an interpretation. Miller undertook a wide variety of artistic projects for the Dil Pickle Club, a progressive speakeasy, theater, and cabaret, and its corresponding Dil Pickle Press. Around 1920 Miller opened the nearby House at the End of Street gallery, which was one of the first venues in Chicago to feature the work of modern artists, including Albert Bloch, Lyonel Feininger, and John Storrs. One critic covering the opening stated, “Edgar Miller probably knows as much about modern art as anybody in town,” before going on to describe his progressive curatorial approach to the gallery and its management. Miller sought to invite artists “whose work [he] believes has genuine merit,” give them a certain amount of allotted space, and thereafter exercise no further control or limitations on them. He wanted to “eliminate all personal feeling in the selection of artists to exhibit” and intended to “fight all attempts of cliques to control the activities of the gallery.”⁴

By the 1930s, however, modernism began to exert a palpable influence in Chicago. For example, the Century of Progress International Exposition (1933–34), for which Miller contributed murals and helped direct the Streets of Paris concession, emphasized art moderne and deco aesthetics alongside broader technological advancements. Katharine Kuh opened her eponymous gallery in 1935, one of the first commercial spaces to exhibit modern art in the city, which she operated until 1943, when she began a storied curatorial career championing contemporary practitioners at AIC. The artist László Moholy-Nagy founded The New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in 1937, and fellow German émigré the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe arrived at the Armour Institute of Technology in 1938. Their collective pedagogical efforts would coalesce at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1940s. The end of the 1930s also saw the establishment of additional Chicago institutions that would become important incubators for modern art, including the Hyde Park Art Center and South Side Community Art Center.⁵

The fifty-year period of Miller’s career examined in Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1917-1967 at the DePaul Art Museum (DAPM) (September 12, 2024 – February 23, 2025) emerged alongside the development of modernism in Chicago, but for all his avant-garde inclinations, Miller and the work he produced often ran in a counter direction. He developed a signature style but never embraced geometric abstraction or machine age aesthetics, remaining committed to naturalistic representation and principles of ornamentation. Instead of streamlined minimalism and subjective expressionism, Miller pursued a maximalist celebration of embellishment, patterns, and figurative storytelling. Modernism suggests progress, newness, a breaking with the past, but Miller’s work is unabashedly anachronistic. His affinity for traditional crafts like stained glass and his overall approach to the studio complexes, for example, make overt reference, often within a single work or project, to a wide array of historic periods, cultures, and disciplines, creating a complex pastiche. As one critic noted while discussing a banister carved by Miller:

It is utilitarian. And it is decorative. And at the same time, it is more than is denoted by each of these terms or both of them. There is something outlandish. Something medieval about Miller’s banister and his stained glass windows; and yet they do not seem strained or unnatural. Probably the reason is that because Mr. Miller is a real artist, he cannot help but infuse something of our time into his forms, despite the fact they are patterned after models out of the dim past.⁶

Today—and even when Miller was making it a century ago—his work seems to belong both to an earlier moment and, somehow, out of time altogether.

To describe Miller as “anti-modern,” as the title of the DPAM exhibition suggests, is not to position him as retrograde or even imply that he was against modernism or its principles. Rather, the phrasing here is deployed as a means of complicating what has all too often become a monolithic narrative around what defines a modern artist, as well as the history of modernism’s emergence in Chicago during the twentieth century. In part, the idea of being anti-modern points to Miller’s general nonconformity and overall resistance to dogmatic labels. As he once said of his curatorial approach at the House at the End of the Street: “It is just as foolish to draw a line in favor of modernism as against it. We want to get the best available work for exhibition regardless of whether or not it falls within the accepted modern category.”⁷ Miller was interested and invested in the ideas being espoused in modern art but seemed wholly disinterested in taking sides.

Miller’s anti-modernism acknowledges that the label of modernism was itself complicated and unresolved at the time. For example, the Carl Street Studios and Kogen-Miller Studios, perhaps Miller’s best-known works, were widely celebrated at the time for their novelty and originality in both form and approach. One critic described them as “modern in every aspect” but notably qualified the statement, writing, “but the word modern in this case should be applied with certain restraint. The Studios are modern inasmuch as the builders decided that this or that innovation was practical for their purpose.”⁸ For Miller, modernism was a means to an end, not the end itself—not the singular pursuit of his practice but rather one reference, one further influence or idea among many, that he could draw upon.

Miller disregarded movements, trends, or pursuing a “pure” art that privileged a singular creator and would be seen by only an elite few in a white-walled gallery. In many ways, his work anticipates or is better aligned with postmodernism and its embrace of pluralism, the collapsing of high and low, and the classical, traditional, or vernacular styles. His aesthetic—full of rich textures, jewel-toned color palettes, graphic ornament, and charming animal imagery—remains unmistakable in its authorship and may seem almost quaint in its address, but so much about Miller’s practice feels prescient and still relevant to the contemporary moment. He was a pioneer in what is today referred to as adaptive reuse and demonstrated the potential of recycling and repurposing found materials in his building projects. Miller’s ability to crisscross the boundaries of fine and commercial art was not simply a negotiation of economics, a necessity to support oneself as a “working artist,” but rather a declaration that art—whether conceived as a building complex, mural, sculpture, or advertisement—can and should play a role in everyday life. There is an intentional approachability to Miller’s work and a commitment to collective, collaborative making across his practice. As he stated: “My great desire was to communicate with others in a common language. The human being who relates to human beings is the one who achieves something.”⁹ Miller achieved much, but his work was almost always for public consumption and rarely realized alone.

Miller and his collaborators left an indelible mark on Chicago, and a significant number of his projects, including the artist studio projects in the Old Town and Lincoln Park neighborhoods, remain in situ across the city and its environs. Over the past century, however, these contributions have become hidden in plain sight, their significance largely forgotten. Because Miller operated across so many disciplines and often created work intended to be used and mass-produced, existing examples are either pervasive—and thus devalued or not given consideration as “works of art”—or extraordinarily hard to locate, if they even still exist at all. While material related to some of the commissions Miller realized for various firms, agencies, and organizations can still be found, there is no centralized or official archive. Frank Miller, Edgar’s brother and sometime collaborator, donated a large cache of ephemera, sketchbooks, and other related archival materials to the Chicago History Museum and more than one hundred artworks to DPAM, but for decades the fragmented contents of Miller’s estate—including any works, writings, and documentation in his possession at the time of his death—have languished under unsettled private ownership and legal disputes, making them inaccessible. Attempting to organize a comprehensive retrospective of Miller’s work, in many ways, has proven to be an inherently fragmented, if not futile, undertaking. Too much is hidden, lost, and uncertain—or still embedded in the urban fabric of the city, and thus unable to be shown in the galleries of a museum.

Miller has remained a dexterous, mosaic figure, and it is perhaps fitting then that a retrospective exhibition of his dispersed, multifaceted creative practice should acknowledge and present his work in an equally fragmented way. The ability to present or even attempt a full or complete picture of Miller’s artistic output is further complicated by one of its most interesting features—the fact that it was made by the hands and minds of multiple authors. Save for his drawing practice, Miller rarely worked alone. His history is littered with partnerships, significant and fleeting, that helped shape his career, but today the exact nature of these collaborations makes it difficult to determine definitive divisions of labor and spheres of influence. He frequently worked with the architectural firm of Holabird & Root, and for decades he was personally and professionally close with the architects Howard Van Doren Shaw and Andrew Rebori, who himself remains something of an overlooked figure. The sculptor-designer Alfonso Iannelli and designer-illustrator Margaret Iannelli also proved formative influences early on in his career. Even in such cases, where Miller’s partners were equally or even more well-known, however, it is difficult to know exactly who did or created what.

Miller’s collective, anti-modernist approach to the process of making is something to examine and celebrate, but with the realities of gender, racial, and class inequalities present, as well as the passage of time, identifying the specific contributions of many of his collaborators presents a great challenge. Throughout his career, Miller directly and indirectly worked with women, people of color, immigrants, unskilled laborers, and union tradespeople—all individuals who are all too often largely absent or incompletely represented in the historical record and were rarely credited alongside Miller.

For example, Jesús Torres, an immigrant from Silao, Mexico, established himself as a gifted artist-craftsperson in Chicago during the interwar years. After arriving in the city in 1924, he enrolled in English language and art classes at Hull House, where he likely met Miller. Torres received critical attention in publications like the Chicago Tribune, lectured and exhibited at AIC and the Renaissance Society, and undertook metalwork for the Radio Club in Chicago and Saks Fifth Avenue. Shortly before his early death in 1949, he received a major commission from the Pullman Company to design five railcars for the Golden State Limited line.“¹⁰ Though he was a major contributor to the Carl Street, Kogen-Miller, and Walter Guest Studio projects and created other smaller scale works with Miller, Torres was described as Miller’s “assistant”—if his name and involvement were mentioned at all.¹¹

Much like Torres, Miller’s sister Hester Miller Murray was a frequent and much valued collaborator on his projects during the late 1920s and 1930s.¹² In addition to her work at the studio complexes in the Old Town and Lincoln Park neighborhoods, Miller Murray helped paint the numerous stained-glass windows at the Oakridge Mausoleum in Hillside, Illinois. While Miller designed elaborate, intricate lead and glass windows for the lobby of the Trustees System Service Building at 182 West Lake Street in Chicago’s Loop, Miller Murray did all the actual cutting. She also notably collaborated with Miller on the stained-glass windows commissioned for the men’s lounge of the Medinah Athletic Club (now the InterContinental Hotel) at 505 North Michigan Avenue. This was the first time she chose to sign her name alongside her brother’s, even though he had encouraged her to do so on previous projects.¹³

Though hardly a household name today, Miller Murray, like Torres, established an active, well-received creative practice in Chicago. She arrived in 1927 and, in addition to working with Miller on numerous projects, attended classes at SAIC. While there she met her future husband, Burt Murray, with whom she would later establish a successful church decoration company.¹⁴ During the 1930s, she worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and created murals for the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, and the Irving School in Oak Park, Illinois. The Museum of Modern Art in New York included a photograph and two painted studies of the latter project, along with two of Miller Murray’s other paintings and a poster design created for the Brookfield Zoo, in its 1936 exhibition New Horizons in American Art.¹⁵ Several of Miller Murray’s WPA-era paintings are now in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Western Illinois University Art Gallery.

Another important collaborator was Dale Holcomb, who in 1940 became Miller’s second wife. A 1951 Chicago Tribune feature on the circus-like menagerie that was the Miller household at mid-century, when they lived above the Normandy House restaurant at 800 Tower Court, makes much of the creative lifestyle led by the entire family, which by that time included their sons, Skippy and Ladd. Dale is described as Miller’s “brunette wife,” who, “as Dale Holcomb[,] won plaudits for her pastel portraits before she became involved in homemaking and looking after a couple of precocious youngsters.”¹⁶ Though Dale had likely been involved in much of her husband’s work since they met in 1933, while both were working at the Century of Progress International Exposition’s Streets of Paris concession, the article simply noted that since their children were now “pretty well able to look after themselves, she’s turned to hand silk screen printing—transferring her own and her husband’s designs to fabrics—and the orders from decorators are coming in fast.” Dale was certainly involved in the design and production of textiles during the period, which was a family affair, as evidenced by the border stamp signed on many examples: “Edgar Miller Skippy and Dale Fabrics—Hand Printed.”

She also contributed to Miller’s work on the Statler Hotel in Washington, DC, in 1943. Commissioned by Holabird & Root, only Edgar Miller is credited on the project. In a later, broad-reaching interview, however, John Augur Holabird casually noted of the project: “When they did the Statler in Washington, he [Miller] and his wife spent about six weeks there just painting up a storm. They painted the lobbies, and they painted the little bar ceilings and walls.” The interviewer asked in return, “His wife too?” Holabird responded: “Yes. I can’t remember what her name is. I don’t think she was as gifted as Edgar, but he may have let her fill in the colors. She was a funny lady.”¹⁷ This is the only known mention of Dale’s involvement in the project.

This type of historical erasure was not limited to the friends, family, and collaborators whom Miller directly engaged; it also occurred with many of the individuals who helped fabricate his work. Later in the same interview, Holabird offered some valuable insights into Miller’s contributions to the architectural firm’s Northwestern University Technological Institute. He stated: “Edgar provided the designs, and somebody else had an air hammer and was whacking them out. I guess you did it the way sculptors had their work enlarged or done, you hired somebody to do some of the dirty work.”¹⁸ The hiring of craftspeople or laborers has and continues to be standard operating procedure for artists and designers working across a broad range of disciplines and mediums. Miller frequently outsourced the fabrication of his work, from the printers who produced his illustrations and advertisements to the union members who helped carve, cast, etch, and install some of his larger-scale public commissions. The narratives of modernism may suggest that art is made by a single genius, but the actual realization was rarely a solitary affair—the collective participants in its making were just not credited.

Interestingly, in the same interview with Holabird, he continued in his discussion of the Technological Institute, noting:

Sylvia Shaw Judson did it. She could use a mallet and chisel but [with] lots of her limestone work they’d take measurements off and then she wasn’t strong enough, really, to use a hammer, so her limestone work was done by a studio, and then she’d sometimes go and supervise the finishing or do some touch-up.¹⁹

Even if Holabird’s misogynistic framing of women as too weak to sculpt or capable simply of overseeing the “finishing” is dismissed, Judson was a tremendously accomplished sculptor at the time. Holabird’s emphatic, if also perhaps offhanded, statement of her involvement with the reliefs for the Technological Institute, like Dale Miller’s involvement with the Statler Hotel project, is the only time this information appears. Moreover, it was only discovered through a random archival search for “Edgar Miller.”

None of this is to directly disparage Miller as a collaborator, no less a husband, father, or brother—these dynamics are even harder to establish through the existing historical record. However, because there is so little information currently available, if it ever existed at all, in regard to correspondence, journals, or Miller’s written thoughts on collective artistic processes, determining how he felt or saw the involvement of his collaborators is impossible. There are also the historic, societal realities of Chicago at the time. Artists like Torres, Miller Murray, and Dale Miller were not afforded the same opportunities available to Miller because of his race and gender.

Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1916-1967 attempts to name Miller’s collaborators, to tell the broader stories of his projects, and highlight magnificent moments in and out of time, but it also acknowledges his inherent, endless elusiveness. Miller once defined art as a “vision of some beautiful catastrophe—a possibility of some wild accident which happens. . . . Art is something as elusively abstract after you have defined it as it is before.”²⁰ In many ways, this encapsulates his own work, including the projects in which he brought together a broad range of collaborators and participants. Today, in fragments, snippets, and material traces, Miller’s expansive art seems the product of some wild accident, a moment where multiple materials and people came together in the city of Chicago (and sometimes a bit farther afield) to create something beautiful, something useful to people going about the business of their everyday lives—whether going to work, enjoying a meal, or coming home.