Is Enid Collins the Queen of Kitsch? Karen Adler looks at the artistry behind the bling in a special presentation April 28
Enid Collins reacts to being called “famous the world over for her handbags that really are different” during a Seattle talk show appearance sometime in the late 1960s. Courtesy of Michael Maloy, Empirical Media.
Have you ever had that feeling?
There you are, in the midst of a dreary everyday or soon-forgotten errand when –– zowie! You’re struck by the undeniable dart of physical attraction.
When you’re not looking for it, in a fragment of an instant easily missed, something catches your eye. Not some one. Some thing.
Something small. Something strange. Something… spangled.
You have no idea what it is. But you know you have to have it.
This bolt-from-the-blue infatuation is how many people describe their first experience with a vintage handbag called “LOVE”.
That’s right. They’re not talking about partners or soulmates or an afternoon hook-up.
They’re talking about a purse.
“I walk in and there’s this table and I just see this wooden box bag––at the time I didn’t even know what it was or what it was called––but you see this, and you’re utterly bewitched by it,” says Laura Seargeant-Richardson, a product and experience designer from Austin, Texas, who was aimlessly wandering through a local antiques mall when lightning struck.
The object was about the size of a box of upscale chocolates. Constructed of wood and painted with colorful letters spelling L-O-V-E, it gleamed with glass and plastic jewels.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh yeah. I gotta have this,’” she says. “I brought it home, and that’s when the love affair started.”
About a decade earlier in upstate New York, glass artist Pat Duell was similarly enchanted by a “LOVE” bag decorated in Easter-egg-toned gems. The attraction, he says, was the art.
“I liked the fact that it was a little kitschy,” he says. “And I like things that are different.”
“LOVE” mini box bag by Enid Collins for Collins of Texas, 1970.
A father of five, he found himself buying the purse on impulse and quickly amassed a bejeweled-bag collection, displaying them all in his bedroom. Through the art, he says, the artist “has been here almost as long as my wife.”
“I remember it like it was yesterday, first laying eyes on that bag,” says Karen Adler, who was killing time in a Chicago vintage shop in 2011 when she stumbled across another “LOVE” bag. This one was square-ish and recalled the widely imitated stacked-letter “LOVE” design of Mid-Century artist Robert Indiana. It was decked out with flowers of white, gold and green gems.
“I picked it up and stared at it,” Adler says, “wondering, ‘Who is this?!’”
“LOVE” box bag by Enid Collins for Collins of Texas, 1968.
The “who” is Enid Collins, a Mid-Century decorative artist who between 1946 and 1972 created a prolific cascade of handbag designs, including the irresistible “LOVE.” Collins founded her studio after World War II with her husband, Frederic, an engineer and sculptor who collaborated on designs and fashioned hand-cast bronze elements for their fine-leather lines. By 1966, Collins of Texas box bags and totes sparkled in department store windows from Fifth Avenue to Phoenix.
But back in Chicago in 2011, Adler, like many, had never heard of Enid Collins. And she had never seen anything as weirdly seductive as a Collins of Texas bejeweled bag.
“I liked the idea of painting with jewels,” she says, explaining that Collins’s artistry was part of the attraction from the start. “I liked the colors.”
But that’s not why she had to have it.
“It just made me happy.”
Back home in Colorado, Adler couldn’t stop thinking about her “LOVE” bag. Within months, she’d found another 50 purses and was soon accumulating more in order to learn about them and the woman who created them. A trained cultural anthropologist, she documented her finds to create a museum-grade record. Under the name, “Finding Enid with LOVE”, she launched a website and raised money to buy more pieces by selling refurbished duplicates and replacement jewels online.
Today, her collection has grown to more than a thousand artworks, plus photos and documents such as vintage advertising.
Collins’s art is an academic focus for Adler, who has been exploring lines between kitsch, camp and fine art as part of her work toward a professional certificate in museology with the University of Colorado in Boulder.
It’s also the subject of “Enid of Collins: Queen of Kitsch?”, a one-hour discussion Adler will present as part of Arizona Tiki Oasis, the Mid-Century meet-up and marketplace being held at Hotel Valley Ho in Scottsdale April 28 through 30.
Her April 28 talk will explore how we experience and define Collins’s beguiling bags, and ask us to consider them from a new perspective.
The fevered desire for Collins’s work is driven by many factors, including the explosion of online resale shops such as Etsy and a booming interest in anything Mid-Century. But the endurance of the attraction over more than six decades, and that feeling of phenomenon so many people describe, suggests something more important, Adler says.
“Enid Collins took her art very seriously but she also understood the power of kitsch,” she says, adding that kitsch’s roots in pop and commercial culture often cause us to dismiss it as sentimental, garish, or “bad taste,” and miss its potential artistic functions.
Although Collins clearly designed products to appeal to consumers, Adler argues, she did so with an artistic sense that recognizes how art may exploit emotion to startle us out of mental ruts, spark curiosity and connect us with others – even across decades.
“Her art is about the emotional experience, the sometimes-ironic encounter with the object itself, rather than an artwork that inspires some deeper appreciation or higher contemplation,” she says. “Yes, it’s sentimental. But sentimentality comes from a very honest place, your heart. It’s not dogged or calculated. It’s who you are.”
Maybe Enid Collins didn’t intend that this variation of “copy cats” be taken as “serious art”, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t take her art seriously.
Like Andy Warhol, Collins intended to create art that was fine yet not “serious,” Adler argues, a purpose evidenced in artistic choices we can trace in her bags today.
“Art like Enid’s ends up being labeled common, lowbrow and sentimental, especially since she was working outside of what counted as ‘high’ art; that is, architecture, painting and sculpture,” Adler says. “You’re making box bags for women? You’re going to be called low art. You have no choice. They don’t consider what you’re doing art at all. But Enid turned that around, made the ‘lowbrow’ high fashion.”
Collins trusted her audience to trust themselves when it came to art, she adds.
“Going with your own instincts, never minding who might disagree or call it ‘just kitsch’ – that’s how a new perspective on an artist can start,” she says. “Take the whole contemporary Tiki culture, how it has come into its own. All of these people trusted their judgment and said, ‘Hey! This is great stuff! We think this is amazing.’ And here we are.”
In addition to the presentation, Adler will offer a rare opportunity to view a large collection of original vintage Collins box bags and totes – and purchase them. Finding Enid with LOVE will operate a “Collinsiana Cabana” pop-up shop as part of the Arizona Tiki Oasis Marketplace from 4 to 6 p.m. April 28 and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 29. It will be located in the Cabana Room vending section along the hotel’s main OH Pool.
The April 28 sale is open only to those with a regular or deluxe Evening Resort Pass. The April 29 Market is free and open to the public.
