Studio Furniture of the Renwick Gallery: Smithsonian American Art Museum | 
| Author: Oscar P. Fitzgerald
Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 551782
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 11.9 x 8.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 1565233670
Dewey Decimal Number: 749.0973074753
EAN: 9781565233676
ASIN: 1565233670
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
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Product Description
Exquisitely photographed and beautifully designed, this complementary catalog of America's finest studio furniture highlights 84 pieces from the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery. Inside, the pages reveal the importance of wooden furniture in the modern American craft arena, and how first- and second-generation artists shaped the studio furniture movement. Artist statements accompany gorgeous photography of the Renwick collection and provide insight into the makers' training and professional experience, theories on art, artistic techniques, and even personal inspirations. Such artists include the patriarch of studio furniture, Wharton Esherick, and Wendle Castle, the maker of the most popular piece among gallery visitors—the infamous Ghost Clock. The treasures of the Renwick collection—Judy's McKee's Monkey Settee, Sam Maloof's Rocking Chair, John Cederquist's Ghost Boy, and George Nakashima's Conoid Bench—are also included among the many pieces from makers whose work is functional, artistic, and of the finest craftsmanship.
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| Customer Reviews:
outstanding studio furniture from a Smithsonian collection October 11, 2008
All 84 furniture pieces of the Gallery a part of the Smithsonian are pictured in full-page color photographs on righthand pages with comments on them and their makers on facing lefthand pages. One sees immediately on looking through the many pieces what Greenhalgh means when he writes in the Foreword, "Furniture is perhaps more allied to architecture than any of the other individual craft-based arts." This is especially true of this studio furniture made between the early years of the 1900s to the early years of the twenty-first century. While the furniture is self-evidently modern, made basically of wood, never loosing sight of its utilitarian purpose, and its inner details (rather than flourishes, for example), it for the most part it is for the most part within the mainstream of furniture, particularly Victorian furniture and more recently art nouveau and the arts-and-crafts furniture toward the end of the Victorian era. Where the Renwick Gallery pieces depart somewhat from the mainstream it is not in shape simply for the sake of shape nor in riotous colors or assemblage calling into question the meaning of "furniture". Where this furniture departs, it is mostly in whimsical touches.
Looking over the collection, one also sees what Greenhalgh means when he comments this furniture comes from a "furniture world [that] was, on the whole, less cohesive and dramatic than these other genres [e. g., jewelry] and unfolded in a more subtle and complex way." No movement, school, or "intellectual thrust" in American furniture making during this period of roughly a century meant that there was "rather, a number of seams of activity." While basically falling within the mainstream, each piece is nonetheless distinctive in appearance. The many chairs--the collection's largest category of furniture--are each distinctive for length of back, size of seat, shape of arms, and details in these. The chairs are distinctive mainly for their sense of proportion among these variables. Except for a few, they're not meant to be ostentatious, nor call attention to their maker. The impression they give off is that of being well-made; and if they give of any kind of statement, it is that of the nearness of the world of nature and the subtle and to some extent mutable connections between it and the human world.
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