Modern Artist Dick Seeger Pioneered Scottsdale; Now He Turns to His Own Backyard

At the invitation of Lloyd Kiva, in 1962, Seeger moved kit and caboodle to Kiva's well-known Fifth Avenue Craft Center, the vortex of Scottsdale art activity at that time. Be they room dividers, free-standing partitions, furniture, illuminated panels, dangling curtains or screens for commercial or residential use, his colorful, carved plastic constructions were in huge demand.

"Nobody ever did that kind of stuff," Seeger says. "I did a lot of that," actually forging a lucrative career as an artist, a remarkable feat at the time.

Jamie Peachey

A beast-headed man greets visitors to Seeger's great room.

Jamie Peachey

Assorted oddities hang from the ceiling of the "ethnic room."

Details

Take a tour: of Dick Seeger's home in this slide show.

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• Dick Seeger
• Dave Hampton
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• Visual Arts
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Here in the Valley, he created decorative pieces for hotels and restaurants, Elizabeth Arden's Maine Chance, the downtown Goldwater's fur salon, and the Pepsi-Cola Business Management Institute building, as well as and modular murals for businesses, including American Republic Insurance Company.

One of his first local projects was the window decorations at Phoenix's newly opened Green Acres Mortuary and Cemetery. Eventually, he would also create work for homebuilding giant Kaufman and Broad, the latter of which is Eli Broad, the famous art collector, patron, and founding chairman of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Seeger is still amazed by the constant stream of famous politicians, dignitaries, and celebrities who flowed through his place. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, then a practicing attorney, was a Saturday regular, and Barry Goldwater was known to come in. At various times, Seeger met and chatted with Indira Gandhi, Rock Hudson, Maurice Chevalier, Dinah Shore, Liberace, Dick Van Dyke, Vincent Price, and Reggie Jackson. And who could ever forget meeting Ava Gardner?

The Dick Seeger Design Gallery revved into overdrive, showing not only Seeger's latest work, like decorative mobiles, coasters, trivets, and candleholders, but that of an expanding stable of artists from the Southwest. The artist had his own designs in a slew of upper-end American department stores, including New York's Bloomingdales, Dallas' Neiman Marcus, Bullocks stores in California, Chicago's Marshall Field, and Saks Fifth Avenue stores around the country.

In 1968, Monsanto magazine did a cover feature on his work in an issue also spotlighting stewardesses in white go-go boots and flip hairdos. In it, Seeger's "Accents" — custom-created, translucent plastic shapes in eye-popping colors strung together with nylon filament — and his other carved plastic objects were hailed as creating a serious new art medium; of course, the chemical giant happened to be the source of critical components used in making polyester resins.

Monsanto noted that free-spirited Seeger wasn't cowed by clients: "His clients . . . know that Seeger will take no dictation from them. He does not even show preliminary sketches, insisting that if the client doesn't like the finished job, he'd rather do it over. So far, he has never had to." At this point, the artist was also writing down "thoughts," pithy sayings or profound observations that would pop into his head on a regular basis, transforming them into paintings displayed on the gallery walls.

Those unending thoughts mutated into another entire line of artwork — hand-lettered or painted text capturing his philosophical musings.

Long before computer graphics allowed artists to crank out Photoshopped text with a few strokes on a keyboard, Seeger was laboriously painting and lettering his "thoughts" in a bewildering array of typefaces.

In 1974, Arizona Highways devoted three pages to Seeger's "thought capsules," as they described the work, noting that a variety of his art pieces in different media were on permanent display at the new Elaine Horwitch Gallery, 42 Marshall Way. His "Book of Thoughts" about art, love, and architecture was available as three suites of 90 cards each, and later in book form as Sightwithinsight (1974) and I've been thinking (1976).

Everything old is inevitably new again — and that applies to interest in Dick Seeger's mid-20th-century work, resurrected by the recent mania for retro vintage and Midcentury Modern design and décor.

In 2008, Seeger became the subject of The Seeger Studio 1957-1962: Desert Modern in Scottsdale, Arizona, a book authored by Dave Hampton, in which the Scottsdale artist is elevated to the status of an American modernist master who pioneered the use of plastic in art. Hampton discovered Seeger during his search for information about the work of the late Jack Boyd, a highly regarded San Diego sculptor and jeweler working in the '50s and '60s.

Hampton, also the curator of "San Diego's Craft Revolution From Post-War Modern to California Design," which soon will open at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego on October 16, is unequivocal in his assessment of Seeger's role in Midcentury Modern design.

"For me, Dick Seeger is the trifecta," says Hampton. "He knew all these other artists, carried and sold their work in his gallery, and he's obviously a completely mad collector. He's right there in the middle of things; at the same time, he never got the museum-style or national recognition that, say, Freda Koblick of San Francisco, who also worked in plastic, did.

"Regionally, he carried so many artists — he knew everybody in New Mexico, Arizona, and California — and he was in a lot of regional shows . . . I don't think he cared that much about trying to submit his work for museum shows or invitational showings. He didn't push his work that way because he kind of had it all sewn up. He was such a big deal, the way people remember his gallery; he was the only place in town to combine these really major talents and to put his own work there."