BROOKLYN, N.Y. - Like his namesake George Ohr, Nineteenth Century furniture maker George Hunzinger prompts a range of response, from nervous laughter to boisterous approval. But unlike the mad potter of Biloxi, Miss., Hunzinger was no head case.

A well-argued and cleverly presented exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art through February 15 makes it clear that Hunzinger was crazy, like a fox. A German-American immigrant whose dates parallel Horatio Alger's - both were born in the 1830s and died within a year of one another in the 1890s - Hunzinger might have figured in the fabulist's Luck and Pluck series. Arriving in Brooklyn in New York in 1855 with nothing, Hunzinger built his solidly middle-class enterprise into a thriving 50-man manufactory. A half century earlier, only Duncan Phyfe could have boasted the same.

Today, the father of the folding chair - who also created sofas, settees and tables - is best known for his quirky seating furniture, exuberant novelties made equally for comfort and conversation. Since 1989, when an exhibition was first discussed, Dr Barry R. Harwood has been contemplating these ingenious fabrications, which in their boldness and brevity prefigure Modern design.

An associate curator in the Brooklyn Museum's department of decorative arts, Harwood makes a convincing case that Hunzinger furniture - largely ahistorical, endowed with a peculiar machine-age grace, and shrewdly attentive to mass-market preference - was dramatically ahead of its time. As the curator writes in the accompanying monograph, The Furniture of George Hunzinger: Invention and Innovation in Nineteenth-Century America, though not high style, Hunzinger furniture was uniquely American in its progressive character.

When George Hunzinger died suddenly of a stomach ailment in 1898, he was remembered as a "master hand at designing, following no particular school." His obituary and a handful of commercial documents and city directories contain all that was written about the craftsman in his own time. Far more was published on Herter Brothers and other suppliers to the super rich. Significantly, only one Hunzinger chair is pictured in Artistic Houses, the 1880s compendium of elite taste.

Success coupled with obscurity made Hunzinger a natural topic for the Brooklyn Museum, and a likely subject for Harwood. A William Morris-pattern tie hints at the affinities of the former dealer, who earned his doctorate at Princeton. In 1987, Harwood was recruited to the Brooklyn Museum by Dianne Pilgrim, organizer of the landmark 1986 exhibition "The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941." Before leaving to direct Manhattan's Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Pilgrim and her husband donated a Hunzinger chair to the BMA, which now owns 15 chairs, a table and a patent model by its naturalized son.

With its stately if rather smudged profile turned toward Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Museum is reminiscent of another shabbily chic repository of Nineteenth Century decor and well-furbished period rooms, London's Victoria and Albert Museum. "The Brooklyn Museum was the most obvious place for this show because of the museum's interest in progressive furniture," notes Harwood. "Brooklyn has been more diligent than most in collecting Nineteenth Century material, from Herter down the line. And in the 1930s, we exhibited contemporary furniture."

Joseph T. Butler was the first to recognize the unique character of Hunzinger design, Harwood writes. Butler, a Winterthur fellow and retired curator of Historic Hudson Valley, had rescued two Hunzinger chairs from Chadwick Villa in Newburgh, N.Y., publishing them in 1962. The field laid fallow until 1980, when Richard W. Flint published the first of three articles on the German-American manufacturer. Several key documents, retrieved from a collateral relative and now in the collection of Rochester's Strong Museum, underpinned Flint's work.

With very little else to go on, Harwood began compiling scrappy bits of census reports, tax records, trade journals, and documents, piecing together an archetypally American story of marketing prowess rewarded by financial gain, one in which form followed function and mechanical means justified artistic ends.

Hunzinger was progressive in three ways, Harwood writes. First, the furniture maker allowed the idea of the machine - powered lathes and mechanized saws, particularly - to exercise aesthetic influence on his designs, which set into motion an ornamental omnibus of sprockets, knobs, pendants, pinwheels and other pared-down geometric shapes.

Second, Hunzinger's marketing and production seemed to anticipate modern practices. Hunzinger furniture - usually impressed, labeled or tagged with its maker's name - displayed technical virtuosity in its many movable parts. It extended, collapsed, swiveled, reclined, nested and folded, its kineticism in keeping with the restless strivings of post-Civil War America.

Beginning in 1860, Hunzinger secured 21 technical patents. It is through these commercial records that the furniture is documented and dated. Obtained in 1860, Hunzinger's first patent was for an extension table permanently incorporating eight leaves. An 1866 patent for a folding-reclining armchair made the inventor a fortune and paved the way, in 1897, for a convertible lounge chair that metamorphosed into a bed. Enter the Barcalounger.

In our own age of assembly-line production, when interchangeable parts guarantee homogeneity camouflaged by options, it is easy to forget that custom furniture was once genuinely bespoke. Hunzinger changed that, offering a mix-and-match flamboyance of finishes and upholstery treatments to suit all. The same chair came in several woods: maple and walnut in the early days, oak later on; and in different finishes: varnished, ebonized or gilded.

Dressed to please, Hunzinger chairs survive - though rarely - in everything from humble muslin to passementerie-dripping damask. "The Brooklyn Museum is in the forefront of realizing the importance of upholstery," boasts Harwood, who has moved beyond a preservation-minded appreciation of archaeological strata to the still rather radical view that upholstery is an integral, if ephemeral, part of the aesthetic.

To see a Hunzinger patent armchair of 1869 in its original saffron splendor is to be persuaded. Upholstery - a tufted cotton rep ribboned with machine-made wool tapestry - supplies color, texture and contour, plus a vibrant overlay of pattern subtly in keeping with the chair's faux-bamboo frame.

The opportunity to examine Hunzinger's upholstery schemes was made possible by a concurrent curatorial conservation project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Pealing back the layers of the onion - or restoring them, as the case may be - Harwood came to appreciate reupholstery, as well. "We've preserved the history of what's happened to this chair," observes the curator of an 1866 patent folding-reclining seat, redraped in the 1880s with an exotic kilim-style weave.

Several floors below Brooklyn's workaday curatorial offices, 40 pieces of Hunzinger furniture - along with relevant documents and photo blowups - are presented on blond wood plinths against walls the color of pale silk. The simplicity of the installation is meant to convey the vigor, economy and originality of each design. But it is as an ensemble that Hunzinger furniture is most striking. To see these aggressively animated works in one room is to imagine being at a colorful cocktail party. Each guest compels attention, but it's the lively dialogue that entertains.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art is at 200 Eastern Parkway. Hours are 10 am to 5 pm Wednesday through Sunday. Telephone 718/638-5000. The Furniture of George Hunzinger: Invention and Innovation in Nineteenth Century America sells for $29.95 and may be ordered from the museum store.