Surface Attraction: Painted Furniture From The American Folk Art Museum

"Surface Attraction" illustrates an assortment of once-fashionable paint treatments, from graining, veining, marbling, vinegar painting, shelling, seaweed painting and mottling to sponging, stippling, scumbling and smoke graining. Along the way, visitors learn about the badger-hair brushes, sponges, leather, quills, sticks, feathers, putty, chamois and combs used to achieve these special effects.

The exhibition is also entertainingly educational on the composition of paint, transparent, opaque or metallic. For much of the period under consideration, linseed oil was the most common medium used to produce opaque paint and transparent oil varnishes. In the Eighteenth Century, decorators were limited to just over three dozen colors, many of them imported. With the industrial revolution came chemical and manufacturing advances. Collapsible metal tubes were not introduced until 1841, ready-made paints not until after the Civil War, meaning that most artists mixed their own paints each day and had to be highly skilled to do so.

"Surface Attraction" is strikingly presented in a single, narrow gallery on the museum's third floor. As part of Hollander's strategy to direct attention to the paint itself, blanket chests and chairs are suspended on the walls at eye level. An outsized magnifying glass is held up to a circa 1825-40 New England chest-over-drawers, inviting visitors to more closely inspect its surface, a virtuoso exercise in combing, scumbling, dry-brush and vinegar painting.

At the far end of the room is the ultimate example of schoolgirl art: a table lavishly painted around 1841 with musical motifs, baskets of fruit, shells, wreaths of flowers, leaves and pastoral landscapes by Sarah D. Kellogg of Amherst, Mass. The table's pillar and scroll base sits on a low pedestal. Hung on the wall above as if it were a Severin Roesen still life, its graceful oval top is a compelling sight, even from a distance.

A view of "Surface Attraction" from the show's entrance. In the foreground at right, a Maine blanket chest-on-chest on drawers, circa 1830-40, and a Maine drop leaf table of the same date, painted to imitate black rosewood. Left are artist's tools and manuals, including a rare 1812 pamphlet on loan from Columbia University and The Decorative Painters' and Glaziers' Guide of 1827, borrowed from the Smithsonian. -Gavin Ashworth photo

"Surface Attraction" begins with a visual pun, a door decorated by William J. Bell of Indiana in 1873. Beyond this symbolic entrance visitors encounter a document whose mere survival seems extraordinary: a sample box discovered in the Dublin, N.H., home of Moses Eaton Jr (1796-1830), a painter known for his stenciled wall decorations. The box contains ten panels. Nine are grain-painted in different styles, the tenth is coated with the solid, yellow ochre used as ground in the other nine. Having been protected from sunlight and wear, the panels, as brilliant as the day they were made, suggest the startling boldness of early Nineteenth Century taste and the degree to which imaginative design, or Fancy, was prized.

"I wanted people to see that the plain, unpainted panel was the basis for all the fantastic imagery implanted on top," says Hollander, who used photo blowups of the decorated panels as a leitmotif throughout the exhibition.

The first furniture vignette, "Identity in Paint," suggests the immigrant origins of paint decoration with three American blanket chests inspired by German, Dutch and English prototypes. One, a 1792 chest of Hudson Valley, N.Y., origin, has big, ball feet and a sophisticated grisaille design in the Dutch manner of pendant fruit, drapery swags and architectural motifs.

More outstanding still is a 1778 dower chest attributed to Johannes Kniskern. The subject of a study in the fall 2005 issue of Folk Art, the magazine of the American Folk Art Museum, the chest is from a small group of Schoharie County, N.Y., examples that are strongly Germanic in their ornamentation. The chest's molded panels, a throwback to Renaissance design, are painted in a vibrant checkerboard pattern.

Deciding what not to include in "Surface Attraction" was one of the challenges of this relatively small show. Hollander pulled five pieces off the floor during installation when she found she simply did not have space for them.

"It was more important that we gave the pieces we did show breathing room," she recalls. Thus, Pennsylvania, Maryland and the South are sparsely represented by a few handsome pieces. An 1801 tall case clock by Johannes Spitler is something of a Rosetta stone among Shenandoah County, Va., furniture. Until its discovery, the artist who signed his painted furniture "j.SP" was unidentified. The clock provided Spitler's full name and established a direct connection between the motifs that appear both on the furniture and in the fraktur of Jacob Strickler, for whom the clock was made.

Displayed in a section called "Individuality in Paint," the Spitler tall clock is shown alongside two unusual boxes by George Robert Lawton (1813-1885), an artist who worked in Scituate, R.I., a southern New England community not particularly well known for paint decoration. At least 16 pieces have been attributed to Lawton. They were earlier thought to have been made by John Colvin, another Rhode Island craftsman related to Lawton by marriage.

From books such as Rufus Porter's 1825 A Select Collection of Valuable and Curious Arts, and Interesting Experiments, a second edition of which is in the museum's Shirley K. Schlafer Library, artists learned how to make paint and apply it. A small showcase displaying artist's manuals contains the only two pieces in "Surface Attraction" that were borrowed from other institutions. One is Hezekiah Reynold's 1812 pamphlet, the first American manual of paint technology not based on English sources. From Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, it is one of only two copies known to the curator. The other loan, from the Smithsonian Institution, is Nathaniel N. Whitlock's The Decorative Painters' and Glaziers' Guide of 1827, a compendium of decorative technique.

"Surface Attraction" includes a handful of portraits on paper and canvas, a reminder that artists moved easily between disciplines in the early Nineteenth Century. "Betsey Dowst," a watercolor on paper portrait by Joseph H. Davis, confirms the artist's talent for rendering period interiors, particularly painted furniture. Likewise, decorative motifs found on furniture find their way into three primitive watercolor on paper portraits of the Carver family by the so-called Carver Limner of Freeport, Maine.

As a counterpoint to "Surface Attraction," the museum is exhibiting "Obsessive Drawing." The 40 contemporary works, many of them pen or pencil on paper, have a cool, calligraphic quality that contrasts nicely with the bold, saturated colors of the furniture one flight above. Beyond the superficial differences, however, Hollander sees in both shows a heightened awareness of patterning and line.

"We like to pair exhibitions that resonate with one another. Our aim is to present new ways of looking at American folk art that are less predictable and more relevant," the curator explains. She recently had the satisfaction of showing a Maine blanket chest of drawers in "Surface Attraction" to a professional silkscreen artist. He found the case's knotted and burled appearance, achieved entirely through sponging and freehand penciling, "a revelation."

For those who cannot get enough of painted furniture, more is included in "Folk Art Revealed," a new installation, continuously on view, of the museum's permanent collection.

The American Folk Art Museum is at 45 West 53 Street. For information, or 212-265-1040.