Visit:
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Maker's Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940-1990
Wednesday, November 12, 2003 - Sunday, February 8, 2004
The evolution of innovative and artistic furniture design.
American studio furniture—one-of-a-kind, high-end, custom-made work produced in small shops—is one of the most significant developments in American decorative arts during the past half century. This loan exhibition of more than fifty objects drawn from collections across the United States and Canada explores the movement's origins and evolution, as well as its richness and variety.
The studio furniture story begins with Wharton Esherick of Pennsylvania, universally acknowledged as the founder of the movement. In 1940 his table and chairs were seen by millions of people in the "America at Home" display at the New York World's Fair, bringing studio furniture to the attention of a wide audience for the first time. Esherick, along with George Nakashima, Sam Maloof, Walker Weed, and other early makers of the 1940s and 1950s, was enthralled by the qualities of wood and produced graceful, beautifully crafted furniture in a modern mode. In the 1960s an emphasis on freewheeling artistic expression complemented the earlier "reverence for wood" attitude, resulting in the exuberant work of Tommy Simpson, Art Espenet Carpenter, Wendell Castle, Jack Rogers Hopkins, and others. In the 1970s the movement shifted to an intense interest--bordering on obsession--in techniques, exotic woods, and other craft-based concerns as reflected in the virtuoso furniture of Jere Osgood, William Keyser, James Krenov, and Frank E. Cummings. Studio furniture matured into a recognized profession in the 1980s as Judy Kensley McKie, Garry Knox Bennett, Mitch Ryerson, John Cederquist, Ed Zucca, and others became well-known makers.
As George Hepplewhite noted in the late eighteenth century, the challenge for furniture makers is"to unite elegance and utility, and blend the useful with the agreeable." American studio furniture makers have met this challenge, creating innovative furniture that embodies great technical skill and outstanding artistic vision.
Trained as a sculptor, Wendell Castle was inspired by Wharton Esherick's expressive furniture. Castle's enormous Library Sculpture (1965) is an example of the innovative forms made possible by stack lamination. This technique involves gluing layers of wood and shaping the assemblage by cutting away sections. It allowed Castle to make furniture "freed from...the confines of lines and planes"