Emile Norman's Endomosaic: A Window of Wonder

It may be that Emile Norman was destined to become an artist, but the circumstances of his childhood didn’t exactly encourage it. Born in 1918 and raised on a walnut farm in the San Gabriel Valley, he made his first sculpture at the age of 11 from a piece of found granite, ruining his father’s wood chisels in the process. “My mother kept heckling me that I should stop all that nonsense and learn an honest trade,” Norman, who died in 2009, recalled in the 2007 documentary Emile Norman: By His Own Design. “She didn’t know who I was. Never did.” But that background schooled him in other ways, and steeled his determination to succeed on his own terms.

But what really set Norman apart in his artistic career was his unlikely medium. According to the late artist’s nephew, Carl Malone, who worked alongside Norman in his later life, “He really had quite a love affair with plastics.” During World War II, when most metals went to military use, the nascent plastics industry grew as manufacturers looked for alternative materials. So while the Museum of Modern Art remained focused on traditional formats like oil on canvas, Norman was piercing cellulose acetate with a hot electric needle. A New York World-Telegram article from 1944 called 26-year-old Norman’s work with plastic “fascinating.” His great innovation, according to a New York Times review published that same year, was freeing plastic from its industrial and commercial uses and putting it to aesthetic ones.

Among his novel creations were fantastical headdresses (some of which appeared in the 1946 film Blue Skies) and decorative screens and boxes. Norman filed five patents dealing with the manipulation of plastics. “Every time I do a work of art, I learn something technically and artistically,” he said in the documentary. “I’m an experimenter.”

Although he was candid about his methods, Norman could also be very secretive—for instance, no one was allowed in his studio. He also hid much of his life from the outside world, including his sexual orientation. At a time when bar raids could end with men’s names and addresses in the newspaper, Norman closely guarded his attraction to men. That began to change when Norman met Brooks Clement, the man who’d be his partner for the next three decades. In 1946, they moved to Big Sur and began building the house that in some ways would stand as Norman’s greatest work of art.

In the documentary, Norman recalled clearing the land on Pfeiffer Ridge with glee: “That was the butchest part of my life. I loved running that bulldozer,” he said. While Norman made his art, Clement ran the Emile Norman Gallery in nearby Carmel, documented their work and research trips, and, according to newspapers of the time, “managed” Norman’s career.

Their custom-built home, with its expansive views of the Pacific, became a gathering place for friends, the starting point for hikes along the surrounding ridges, and the backdrop of their life. Tucked away from the wider world, they were free to build a life together, be open about their relationship, and enjoy the embrace of their neighbors. Beneath their living space was Norman’s studio, filled with tools, equipment, and jars of crushed glass, where he sometimes worked 18 hours a day. Over the years, his art included delicate wood-inlay panels he called Nature Poems, carved bas-reliefs, and graceful sculptures of animals created by combining wax, wood fragments, and epoxy. Precursors to the endomosaics appeared in Norman’s window displays at places like Bergdorf Goodman in New York, which sometimes included leaves and butterflies pressed between layers of plastic to create shoji-like screens. Until his death in 1973, Clement continued to assist Norman’s work; sometimes the couple signed their collaborative work “Clemile.” On the Masonic endomosaic, Clement’s name appears just under Norman’s.

Today, Norman’s work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Monterey Museum of Art, but the majority of his output is privately owned. Much of it never left their home. As Will Parrinello, who directed the Norman documentary, points out, “The house is itself a work of art, and it was designed to house his artwork.”