American Furniture 2005 Presents Thoughtful Research

American Furniture 2005. Edited by Luke Beckerdite with contributions from Erik Kyle Gronning, Dennis Andrew Carr, Glenn Adamson, David R. Pesuit, Philip D. Zimmerman, Joshua W. Lane, Donald P. White III, William Hosley, Gerald W.R. Ward, Barbara McLean Ward, Philip Zea and Robert F. Trent. Published by Chipstone Foundation, 2006; 282 pages $60 softbound. Distributed by University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766; 800-421-1561 or www.upne.com.

"The Culture Wars Continue" might be the unofficial theme of American Furniture 2005, published earlier this year by Chipstone Foundation, which annually presents thoughtful new research by the some of the field's best thinkers. Implicitly and explicitly, the essays all wrestle with the question of how best to study American furniture, which grudgingly reveals its secrets.

The most cerebral piece, "Mannerism in Early American Furniture: Connoisseurship, Intention and Theatricality," is by Glenn Adamson, who invokes the memory of the late Benno Forman, an innovative Winterthur curator and mentor to two other sometimes radical thinkers, Robert Trent and Robert Blair St George.

By the 1970s, says Adamson, Forman saw furniture studies artificially polarized between two camps: an academic wing intent on overthrowing "the furniture establishment's overemphasis on elite objects" and a "market-driven wing" that, in cahoots with dealers and collectors, often relied on subjective, value-laden judgments about taste.

Using the idea of Mannerism in American furniture, a concept first advanced by Trent, as his test-case for contemporary connoisseurship, Adamson urges an integrated, multipronged approach that gives substantial weight to the artisan's intent. As Adamson concludes, "History of any kind, at its best, is always a matter of enlarging the possibilities of interpretation, not closing them down."

Also revisionist in its perspective is Joshua W. Lane and Donald P. White III's "Fashioning and Framing Community: Woodworkers and The Rise of a Connecticut River Valley Town." Debunking the myth of a common New England character, the authors write that early America was torn by ethnic, cultural and religious differences. But in their detailed genealogical study, the authors demonstrate that, through intermarriage, a common culture arose among woodworkers in the Connecticut River Valley town of Windsor, contributing to the development of regional identity there.

"Early Rhode Island Turning" by Erik Kyle Gronning and Dennis Andrew Carr is gentler in style. With patience and persistence it advances scholarly efforts to go beyond the fixation on Goddard-Townsend to make Rhode Island furniture studies more comprehensive and up-to-date. The great age of Newport's famous craftsmen, suggest the authors, was foreshadowed by notable stylistic independence among Rhode Island craftsman a century earlier.

Another new approach to studying furniture is offered by David R. Pesuit, who writes about the sack back Windsor armchair. The author relies on a highly technical structural analysis, rather than traditional aesthetic analysis, to document the change of the form over time.

Perhaps the most traditional, and useful, essay is by Philip D. Zimmerman, who gives practical advice on identifying and classifying New York card tables made between 1800 and 1825.

For lay readers, American Furniture's book reviews, where scholars vet each other's work, are often the most entertaining entries. In reviewing Connecticut Valley Furniture: Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries by Thomas P. Kugelman and Alice K. Kugelman with Robert Lionetti, et al, William Hosley offers high praise for the authors while puncturing an occasional tendency among the book's many contributors toward pedantry with a few choice words. Am impassioned spokesman for American decorative arts and history in general, Hosley advocates the joyful appreciation of aesthetics that sometimes gets lost in scholarship.

In reviewing John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker by Morrison H. Heckscher with the assistance of Lori Zabar, Gerald W.R. Ward explains why Townsend and Heckscher alike deserve the "great man" treatment.

Philip Zea's review of The Furniture Masterworks of John and Thomas Seymour by Robert D. Mussey, Jr, is, surprisingly, less generous, though Zea credits Mussey with updating our knowledge of an influential craft tradition and teaching history with objects and documents.

Though far from a blanket endorsement, Robert Trent's review of Neil Kamil's book, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics and Material Life in the Huguenots' New York, 1517-1751, prompts curiosity in a thesis so layered and complex that few besides Kamil or Trent could have framed it.

In contrast to the deep but narrow focus of the essays, Gerald W.R. Ward's list of articles, books and catalogs, both popular and scholarly, published on American furniture topics in 2004 and part of 2005, gives a sense of wider activity in the field of American furniture.

-Laura Beach