A chest-on-chest by George
Claypoole, Jr, Philadelphia, circa 1740-1750. Illustrated in
the chapter "The Claypoole Family Joiners of Philadelphia:
Their Legacy and The Context of Their Work." Photo by Graydon
Wood.
American
Furniture:
By Laura Beach
MILWAUKEE, WIS. -- It has been a decade since Chipstone
Foundation in Milwaukee published its premier issue of
American Furniture. Since then, readers have been treated
to a wide variety of articles intended to enlighten, entertain
and even provoke.
"...Our goal is to make American Furniturethe journal of
record for its subject," wrote editor Luke Beckerdite, who has
since welcomed to his pages a generally harmonious, if disparate,
collection of voices. The work of professors, curators, dealers
and collectors published in American Furniturereflects
what is exceptional about the field, our field: it is, and always
has been, a partnership between public and private, for-profit
and charitable enterprise.
A fresh, new volume of American Furniturehas just arrived
in bookstores and on websites, but it is worth remembering and
acknowledging some of the best work of recent years. Three
volumes, especially -- 1995, 1997 and 1999 -- come to mind.
American Furniture 1995, co-edited by Beckerdite and
William Hosley, looked at regionalism, particularly in the study
of New England furniture. It included outstanding essays by
Hosley, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Philip Zea, Edward S. Cooke, Jr,
Kevin M. Sweeney and Neil D. Kamil. Just as rising prices
confirmed a burgeoning interest among collectors, American
Furniture 1997 shed light on Southern furniture, publishing
the work of another group scholars -- among them John Bivins, J.
Thomas Savage, Sumpter Priddy III, Ronald Hurst, Wallace Gusler,
and Anne McPherson -- now much better known on the national
stage. American Furniture 1999 returned to Rhode Island, a
cradle of early scholarship, to offer breakthrough research by
Wendy Cooper, Tara Gleason and others on the arts and crafts of
not only Newport, but Providence.
"American Furniture studies have changed dramatically since the
publication in 1891 of Irving W. Lyon's Colonial Furniture of
New England," Beckerdite wrote in 1993. Thanks to American
Furniture, they are changing still.
American Furniture 2002
Bookstand, London, circa 1750-1760. Mahogany. Illustrated in
the essay "Survival of the Fittest: The Lloyd Family Furniture
Legacy." Photo by Gavin Ashworth.
Five essays in American Furniture 2002are examples of
meticulous sleuthing by authors who, through close study of
artifacts and documents, enhance our understanding of finite
topics. Perhaps more interesting are several essays that look
beyond objects themselves to the cultural circumstances that
created these pieces, and to the values and motivations that
continue to shape the way we collect, evaluate and display
antiques.
Jonathan Prown and Katherine Hemple Prown invoke Sir Christopher
Hill's 1972 observation, "History has to be rewritten in every
generation because, although the past does not change, the
present does...." Scholars who do not challenge dated assumptions
have failed themselves and their public, the Prowns and several
other essayists suggest.
From a market perspective, the most breathtaking of these essays
is "Furniture Fakes in the Chipstone Collection." As authors Luke
Beckerdite and Alan Miller write, Stanley and Polly Stone of
Wisconsin began collecting American furniture in 1946. By 1975,
they, like most major collectors of their generation, had
purchased objects meant to deceive. After the death of her
husband, Polly Stone and the couple's Milwaukee-based foundation,
Chipstone, showed courage in publicly exposing these fraudulent
pieces. There would be far fewer fakes if others were so brave.
"The prevalence and persistence of fakery are intimately linked
to the demands and expectations in the marketplace...," observe
Beckerdite and Miller, who offer a methodical analysis that is
both technically brilliant and unflinching in its conclusions. In
their illustrated argument, the experts dismantle upholstered
armchairs (one of the most commonly faked types of seating
furniture); card tables; an oval table and candlestands; dressing
tables; and a Boston desk-and-bookcase with disguised repairs.
Their tips on physical clues and ploys fakers often resort to
make for fascinating and valuable reading.
The fraudulent pieces were the work of a small group of fakers
practicing from the 1940s to the 1980s, say the authors, who
pointedly refrain from identifying the culprits. For the curious,
a look at American Furniture at Chipstone, 1984, will
reveal the prominent dealer, now deceased, who sold the Stones
the fakes. If the authors know the cabinetmaker by name, they do
not say. Our own queries to dealers and conservators prompted
speculation but provided no definitive answers.
The Prowns' essay, "The Quiet Canon: Tradition and Exclusion in
American Furniture Scholarship," takes the broadest view of all
the essays in this volume. The authors question the validity and
purpose of current scholarship that, out of touch with
contemporary scholarly perspectives in the humanities, makes use
of interpretative paradigms created to meet the needs of museum
more than a century ago.
The Prowns identify the opening of the American Wing in 1924 as
"the defining moment in the historiography of American decorative
arts interpretation." At its most overt, the American Wing and
similar installations "sought to expose the public to the refined
tastes and lofty principles of colonial elites." Just below the
surface, say the authors, were imbedded pernicious assumptions
about race, gender and class.
Similar biases, now mostly corrected, existed in American
literary and historical theory of the time. But while scholars in
those fields have updated their approach, furniture studies seem
intractably conservative, mired in jargon and numbing to the
general public. The status quo needs to change or be abandoned
altogether, write the Prowns, who recommend a transdisciplinary
approach to studying furniture that incorporates contemporary
models from other areas of cultural study.
New installations of American decorative arts at the Milwaukee
Art Museum have served as a laboratory for putting the Prowns'
theories to practice. Rather than observing the "time-honored
strategy of teaching the distinctive stylistic, structural and
regional features that distinguish one group of early American
furniture from another," curators there took a thematic approach,
looking for "continuities rather than ruptures," as literary
critic Jane Tompkins put it, among objects that are diverse in
traditional criteria such as age and origin.
The Prowns value objects not for their formal attributes, or
their adherence to received notions of good taste, but for what
they tell us about the past. Within the museum world at large,
the so-called material-culture approach has not caught on in a
big way, perhaps because it is difficult to do well.
In his seamless essay, "The Politics of the Caned Chair," Glenn
Adamson provides a near-perfect example of a material-culture
analysis. He begins with the wry observation that curators are
often accused of elitism in the sorts of objects they study and
display, yet they do it for a good reason: these upper-class
fineries "seem to have more to say." Caned chairs, made in the
late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Century for the middle
class, are an exception, says Adamson. Assimilating a wide range
of source material, he delves into the history of the cane chair
in England before turning his attention to 30 examples made in
Boston. The chairs, he concludes, "occupy a complex position in
furniture history. They are structurally simple objects, but
extremely complicated texts"; they are "representations of
fashionability itself."
Peter Follansbee also comments on the historical biases that
color scholarship in "Manuscripts, Marks and Material Culture:
Sources for Understanding the Joiner's Trade in Seventeenth
Century America." Follansbee discounts the romantic, early
Twentieth Century notion that craftsmen valued creative
self-fulfillment above all else. Discussing tools, materials,
patrons and makers, he shows that craftsmen's lives were "far
more challenging than we imagine today."
Several well-crafted essays redefine specific topics. In "The
Claypoole Family of Joiners of Philadelphia: Their Legacy and the
Context of Their Work," Andrew Brunk sifts through documentary
evidence on three joiners -- Joseph Claypoole and his sons,
Josiah and George Claypoole -- in the interest of forming a
clearer picture of the late Baroque or Queen Anne style in
Philadelphia. As Brunk explains, the scarcity of dated pieces
from this period has "prevented scholars from developing a
chronology of forms and stylistic conventions...."
In "Pennsylvania Clouded Limestone: Its Quarrying, Processing and
Use in the Stone Cutting, Furniture and Architectural Trades," R.
Curt Chinnici offers details that will aid experts in the
identification and restoration of Philadelphia's
marble-ornamented furniture and buildings of the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries.
In "An Early Cupboard Fragment from the Harvard Joinery
Tradition," Robert F. Trent, here with co-author Michael
Podmaniczky, continues his impressive scholarship in the area of
Seventeenth Century Massachusetts furniture.
Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, in a lengthy study of several
generations of the Lloyd family of Maryland, makes an interesting
argument that family assemblages have more to say than
institutional collections because they are "the result of choices
made over and over by individuals with different tastes,
aspirations and attitudes about historical value and family
identity."
A sideboard table attributed to the shop of Henry Cliffton and
Thomas Carteret, Philadelphia, circa 1755. The table retains
its original slab top, which appears by color and complex
figuring to be from a quarry on the eastern side of the
Shuylkill River. Photo by Gavin Ashworth.
There are some blunt book reviews. An American Vision: Henry
Francis du Pont's Winterthur Museum,Wendy Cooper's catalog to
accompany the 2002 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art,
gets a thumbs down from Kenneth L. Ames. "It is a pretty book and
very enjoyable to leaf through. Reading it is another matter,"
writes the Bard Graduate Center scholar, who calls the work
"superficial, simplistic and unfocused."
Glenn Adamson draws a sharp contrast between The Furniture of
Sam Maloofby Jeremy Adamson and Made in Oakland: The
Furniture of Garry Knox Bennettby Ursula Ilse-Neumann.
"Maloof and Bennett are antithetical in both personality and
style," the reviewer writes. So, apparently, are the books.
Adamson praises The Furniture of Sam Maloofas an
"authoritative" if "somewhat old-fashioned" study, but criticizes
the author for failing to come to a critical conclusion. Made
in Oakland"also achieves a pleasant indeterminate
complexity." In the latter, contributor Arthur Danto's
observations are breezy and entertaining; Edward S. Cooke, Jr's
essay is "a welcome about-face from Danto's overreaching."
Clive Edward's Encyclopedia of Furniture Materials, Trades and
Techniquesand Witold Rybczynski's One Good Turn: A Natural
History of the Screwdrivercompares volumes that could hardly
be more different. Reviewer Gerald W.R. Ward calls One Good
Turn"the kind of book perhaps only an established and
well-known author could get published" and regrets that the
Rybczynski did not spend a few hours with a curator or
conservator, "who could have brought him up to speed."
Nevertheless, he concludes, "it is always a pleasure to follow
the thought process of a great scholar, and Rybczynski doesn't
disappoint."
Each year, American Furnitureincludes an admirably
complete list of recent publications. Compiled by Gerald W.R.
Ward, the ecumenical selection surveys books, cataloges and
articles, academic and otherwise, published between 2001 and
2002.
American Furniture 2002. Edited by Luke Beckerdite,
with contributions from Allen M. Taylor, Luke Beckerdite,
Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, Alan Miller, R. Curt Chinnici,
Peter Follansbee, Andrew Brunk, Glenn Adamson, Jonathan Prown,
Katherine Hemple Prown, Robert Trent, Michael Podmaniczky, Gerald
W.R. Ward, David Wood, Robert C. Cheney and Kenneth L. Ames.
Published by the Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee; distributed by
University Press of New England, 37 Lafayette St., Lebanon, N.H.
03766. (603) 643-7710; 289 pages, $55 softcover. Back issues of
American Furniture are also available from 1994-2001 for $55
each. A two year subscription for current issues can be purchased
for $100, a three year subscription for $145.
