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At Home with Gustav Stickley: Arts and Crafts from the Stephen Gray Collection
Oct 11, 08 thru Jan 04, 09
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This exhibition of approximately 140 objects features exceptional works from the collection of Stephen Gray, as well as related works from the holdings of the Wadsworth Atheneum. On view until January 4, 2009, At Home with Gustav Stickley is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays by Stephen Gray, David Cathers, and Tommy McPherson.
Stephen Gray began collecting Arts and Crafts works in the 1970s. Since that time he has assembled rare early pieces produced by the seminal figure Gustav Stickley, as well as pottery, metalwork, and works on paper that reflect the aesthetic promoted in Stickley’s Craftsman magazines and other period publications. Stephen Gray has made the study of the American Arts and Crafts movement his passion, and has been committed especially to understanding Stickley’s philosophy, ideas, modern design innovations, and the significant role that he played in establishing the American Arts and Crafts movement in America.
The Arts and Crafts movement, rooted in late nineteenth-century Britain, espoused the principle of unity in the arts, believing that all creative endeavors were of equal value. There was a desire both to reform design but also to return quality to the process of making objects. The Arts and Crafts reformers wanted to re-establish a harmony between architect, designer, and craftsman, in order to produce well crafted, well designed, affordable, everyday objects.
Arts and Crafts practitioners generally believed in the value of individual expression, and of design that, while drawing inspiration from the past, did not slavishly copy historical models. Regionalism was to be celebrated, so that buildings would be made from local materials, designed to fit comfortably within the landscape, and reflect vernacular traditions. In creating an overall unity of design, the furniture made for these structures was to be "simple and honest," revealing the beauty of the material and the methods of construction. This was a marked change from Victorian excess and furnishings where decoration had no relationship to form and structure.
Gustav Stickley's Craftsman furnishings epitomized Arts and Crafts design in America. Most Stickley furniture was made of quarter-sawn white oak, a very heavy, dense wood that imparted a quality of spiritual beauty that strongly beckoned to future generations. Traditional cabinet-making techniques were used both structurally and as ornament, including mortise and tenon, bevel, key, peg, butterfly joint, and dovetail. The pieces were then finished to look aged and mellow. Stickley’s stylistic vocabulary exhibited a visual harmony and consistency that reflected across the spectrum of his production, including lamps, metalwork and textiles. This "honest" construction and unity of design became hallmarks of the American Arts and Crafts aesthetic. The Gray collection includes rare early examples of Stickley’s finest furniture designs with pieces dating from the seminal years of 1901-1905.
Complementing Stickley’s production was the art pottery and tiles by makers like Overbeck, Marblehead, Walrath, Grueby, Saturday Evening Girls, and Newcomb College, all of whom are well represented in the Gray collection. Common attributes include the geometric interpretation, conventionalization, and simplification of natural forms, and soft, muted colors. This pottery was informed by the theories of the artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow, who articulated an aesthetic that became the basis for the American Arts and Crafts Movement in all aspects of applied and fine art. These included the ideals of restraint and "the beauty of simplicity," as well as the ideal of the unified design, achieved in part by the harmonious relationship between form and decoration. The Atheneum’s exhibition will include fine examples of Dow’s color woodblock prints. Dow's principles even reached Stickley furniture: LaMont Warner, a protégé of Dow, designed much of the furniture made by Stickley's firm between 1900 and 1906.
At Home with Gustav Stickley will introduce to the public Stephen Gray's collection of the very best Arts and Crafts design and craftsmanship in wood, metal, and clay. This collection, as Gray has defined it, is in itself “a conscious work of art,” a harmonious arrangement of visually similar objects that creates a wholly unified Arts and Crafts environment. Gray lives with these objects, which fill the rooms of his nineteenth-century farmhouse in New York State. This unity of vision, inspired by Dow’s principles, will be reflected in both the selection of objects and in their display in the exhibition, with groupings composed by form, color, and vintage. Major formal and contextual themes embodied in the American Arts and Crafts movement will also be addressed, supported by the objects that were found in Arts and Crafts homes including color woodblock prints, pictorial photography, Edward Curtis photogravures from The North American Indian, art pottery, arts and crafts inspired textiles, and Native American baskets from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Other themes that will be addressed include craftsmanship and the process of "making" and its relation to earlier handicraft traditions including colonial American furniture and the arts of the American Indian; and the role of women and women's art education in the Arts and Crafts movement. Funders
Newman's Own Foundation
The Decorative Arts Council of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Mark Glazier
Several anonymous donors
Related Events
*Enrich your exhibition experience and enter the realm of expertise by joining us for these additional educational programs, free with your museum admission. Please see program dates and times below
Friday Gallery Talk - October 24, 12 pm
The Contemporary Craftsman: Influences of the Arts & Crafts on Today's Designs, presented by Kevin Rodel, Co-author of Arts and Crafts Furniture: From Classic to Contemporary, and furniture designer in Brunswick, Maine. BOOK SIGNING !
Wednesday, November 5, 12 pm.
Paintings, Prints and Native American Baskets: Arts and Crafts Affinities
Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Krieble Curator of American Art
Wednesday lecture November 19, 6 pm
Arthur Wesley Dow and the American Arts and Crafts Ideal, presented by Nancy Green, Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.
Green will introduce the audience to the pivotal figure of educator, Arthur Wesley Dow, whose aesthetic theories about beauty in simplicity and unified design became the basis for the Arts and Crafts movement in America.
Wednesday lecture December 3, 6 pm.
Arts and Crafts Pottery, presented by
Martin Eidelberg, Professor Emeritus of Art History, Rutgers University, and Lecturer in the Sotheby’s Institute Program in American Art.
Eidelberg explores the European origins of the Arts and Crafts movement and the ways in which its ideas were absorbed and transformed by American ceramicists.
Thursday Art in Focus - December 18, 12 pm.
Gustav Stickley, A Rare, Early Oak Dining Set, c. 1901
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