Straightforward Furniture Style Stars In Atheneum Exhibit
On Oct. 7, 1900 — 108 years ago this week — the Tobey Furniture Co. in Chicago ran an ad in the Chicago Tribune under the headline “Furniture as an Educator.”
The ad touted “new furniture” that was “a departure from all established styles, a casting off of the shackles of the past.”
This early advertisement about Gustav Stickley‘s furniture designs went on to describe them as “angular, plain and severe … thoroughly practical, not too good for daily use, moderate in price, in demand by people of culture and taste and that will help to make life better and truer by its perfect sincerity.”
Stickley — who would go on to become the leading American champion of the Arts and Crafts movement — must have chafed under his anonymous arrangement with Tobey Furniture. It soon fizzled, and he began selling his furniture under his own Craftsman Workshops brand and extolling his philosophy in his monthly magazine, The Craftsman.
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Like William Morris, John Ruskin, C.F.A. Voysey and other proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe, who rebelled against the Victorian era’s overwrought designs, Stickley argued that decorative add-ons and embellishments were unnecessary, tiresome, ugly, even dishonest. Further, the shoddy workmanship of mass-produced household products of the time demoralized and exploited workers.
Stickley advocated a return to the integrity and simplicity of straightforward, hand-crafted furniture that would endure, not fall out of fashion after a few years. “One of its chief claims to beauty is its fine plainness.”
An exhibition focused on Stickley’s work from 1900 to 1904 opens Saturday at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
A Collector Empties Out His House
The show is drawn primarily from the extensive collection of Stephen Gray, but that’s putting it mildly: Gray, who began collecting Stickley’s work in the 1970s, says he virtually emptied out his entire Hudson River farmhouse in Columbia County, N.Y., for the show.
His companion, Laura Harris, who is head of the Atheneum’s Docent Council, had told museum curators about his collection, Gray says.
Linda H. Roth, the museum’s chief curator, says she and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, the museum’s curator of American painting and sculpture, visited Gray two years ago.
“When we walked in the door, essentially my mouth dropped,” Roth recalls. Being able to draw on Gray’s extensive collection was a real opportunity for the museum, which Roth says has “a blazing gap” when it comes to Arts and Crafts style. The reason, she says, is that in this part of New England in the early 20th century, people were far more interested in Colonial Revival furniture and decorative arts.
“The collectors weren’t here,” Roth says, “so the gifts weren’t being made.”
Gray says he first learned about Stickley as he set out to furnish the late 18th-century farmhouse he bought in 1976. He was drawn to the uncontrived, natural quality of the designs — and soon became consumed. Stickley’s designs became his life’s passion.
“I just saw something in what Stickley made that was something very special, very American,” Gray says. “It was something harmonious, and a unified style.”
Roth says that, for Stickley, the real beauty lay in letting the material — quarter-sawn white oak — speak for itself, and in exposing the mortise-and-tenon construction, the dovetails, the pegs, the keys, the butterfly joints. The structural details of a piece become the only ornamentation needed; anything beyond that was superfluous.
On its own, though, Stickley’s furniture can seem massive and heavy, another reason the Gray collection was such a find, Roth says. The works of Stickley could be presented in context — along with pottery and ceramics, lamps with silk-lined wicker shades, pendant lights with glass shades, stenciled wallpapers, copper lamps by Dirk Van Erp with mica shades — the elements that combine with the rectinlinear furniture for a warmer, more mellow environment.
“The ensemble is really critical,” Roth says.
Kornhauser rounded out the Atheneum’s exhibition with pieces from the museum’s own collections, including color woodblock prints by Arthur Wesley Dow, tonal paintings, Edward Curtis’ photographs from “The North American Indian,” and a number of handmade Native American baskets and handcrafts — largely made by women, from indigenous materials, which Kornhauser says “perfectly segues into the Arts and Crafts philosophy.”
Stickley may have advocated against furniture based on the whims of style, and he may have deliberately used fairly primitive tools early on, rather than machines, but after about 1905, Gray says, Stickley’s company grew larger and more commercial.
“Because of economics, they tended to reduce the quality of the furniture itself,” he says. The oak used was thinner — which meant less waste — and the designs became more standardized.
Roth says that Gray’s collection “stops at the moment when Stickley began to produce in a much more factory-like manner.”
What An Interior Can Do
Do everyday objects have a moral influence? In 1901, Stickley actually cautioned readers of The Craftsman about “threatening bric-a-brac.”
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In 1904 he wrote that simple, “democratic” art could provide people with “material surroundings conducive to plain living and high thinking, to the development of the sense of order, symmetry and proportion.”
Just as the people one encounters can “compel us toward good or evil,” he wrote, it is the same with material things.
Roth says Stickley embraced the idea of a home environment that was nurturing, serene and restorative.
“After a hard day at work you should find peace and comfort in your own home,” she says. “He had grand ideas of what an interior could do.”
For example, in a 1905 issue of The Craftsman, Stickley wrote that the living room “is the executive chamber of the household, where the family life centers and from which radiates that indefinable home influence that shapes at last the character of the nation and of the age.”
Compared with our own more indulgent age of super-soft sofas, the national character that Stickley promoted evidently was a bit more upright and disciplined.
Stickley’s furniture “is not usually comfortable,” Gray concedes. “The dining chairs are comfortable; they’re covered in leather. Some of the settees are OK. And Morris chairs can be very comfortable. But I just like the look.”
Stickley’s Art
• “At Home with Gustav Stickley: Arts and Crafts from the Stephen Gray Collection” opens Saturday at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. The exhibition runs through Jan. 4.
Taken from www.courant.com