This article was written for the Art Forward series by Diana Bolander, Assistant Director/Curator at the Rahr-West Art Museum.
The Rahr-West Art Museum is currently exhibiting an example of contemporary furniture, The Manitowoc Cabinet, on loan from the Museum of Wisconsin Art. It is enough that it is a beautiful object constructed by regional and local artists, but our appreciation of the cabinet and how it fits into art history is enhanced when examining its inspiration: The Arts and Crafts Movement of North America from 1880-1920.
Key features of Arts and Crafts furniture include rectangular shapes emphasizing vertical lines, dark, stained wood, and simple hardware, yet the Arts and Crafts movement is based more in ideas than an aesthetic. The Arts and Crafts Movement started in England in the mid-1800s largely as a reaction against the Industrial Revolution. Laborers were often mistreated, provided with low-quality housing, and held dangerous jobs with low pay and long hours. Those in the movement felt that machines had replaced the traditional standards of beauty with those of economy and profit and had a sincere distrust of the modern age. They championed hand-crafted objects made of quality materials. English Writer and philosopher John Ruskin felt the system of medieval guilds might serve as a model for modern society. Ruskin, a major cultural influencer in Victorian times, was active in the arts, conservation, and started multiple utopian communities intended to be examples of moral and economic reform.
The name of the movement comes from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in London in 1888 by young artists and artisans frustrated that the Royal Academy omitted “applied and decorative arts” from its definition of art. These artists yearned to elevate the perception of crafts to sculpture and painting. Some also sought to democratize the arts. While John Ruskin provided the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ruskin disciple William Morris became its founder. Morris’ decorative arts company, which reached its height in the 1880s and 1890s, emphasized nature and simplicity of form with the aim of reinstating decoration as one of the fine arts and making affordable products not just for the elite. Morris was a champion of the working classes, founded the Socialist League in 1884, advocating for a worldwide proletariat revolution.
In the United States, the Arts and Crafts movement was not as deeply rooted in social issues though Chicago’s Hull House, a reform settlement, is connected to the movement. In the 1870s the furniture industry in America sought to imitate artistic furniture of England seen as higher quality. Between 1893 and 1901 dozens of arts and crafts societies were founded in America, most of which relied on a wealthy patron. These colonies, modeled after examples in England, were established as social experiments to escape from modernity and return to “the simple life.” They were intended to be income-producing, but most failed to last past WWI. The Craftsman Movement, which evolved from the Arts and Crafts Movement, refers to the years between 1901 and 1916 when the popularity of Craftsman Magazine inspired a severe, geometric style of furniture and ornamentation. The movement culminated in the rise of the Prairie school, the development of a North American style of architecture that embraced handcrafting and craftsman guilds and rejected mass production whose most famous proponent was Wisconsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Manitowoc Cabinet, commissioned in 2018, is a contemporary masterwork of craftsmanship by woodworkers Randy Sahli and Julie Gunderson, woodcarver Patrick Burke, and painter David Carpenter inspired by a 1904 Arts and Crafts era chiffonier, The Byrdcliffe Chiffonier, now in the collection of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Museum of Art. A chiffonier usually refers to a tall chest of drawers with a mirror on top in North America, but this piece relates more to the British definition of a low cupboard.
Commissioned by Dennis Rocheleau for the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the intent of the Manitowoc Cabinet project was to elevate Wisconsin Artists who worked primarily in the industrial arts while paying tribute to the history of labor in Manitowoc County. Wood and glass salvaged from the Hamilton Manufacturing Plant in Two Rivers are incorporated into the cabinet. Relief figures carved on each side of the cabinet represent traditional industries of the Manitowoc area; one featuring a metal foundry.
Byrdcliff was an Arts and Crafts colony for craftsmen in upstate New York near Woodstock, established by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead in 1902. Whitehead studied with John Ruskin in England and became interested in “improving” society. A trip to Italy later influenced him to create a society based on patrons supporting social projects and the arts, similar to the Medici dynasty in Tuscany in the 16th century. The colony produced furniture, pottery, textiles, and metalwork but was not sustainable in the end.
The maker of the Byrdcliffe cabinet is unknown, but the panels were probably painted by Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead, an accomplished artist who also studied with John Ruskin and the wife of Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead. The majority of the furniture at Byrdcliffe was designed by Zulma Steele and Edna Walker, who studied with Arthur Wesley Dow. It is notable that many artists of at the Byrdcliffe colony were women. The Arts and Crafts movement elevated craft, including textile art primarily practiced by women to the same level as painting and sculpture.
Byrdcliffe’s archives have been digitized by Winterthur Library and can be seen explored by searching for Byrdcliffe at http://contentdm.winterthur.org/
The Manitowoc Cabinet, a tribute to the Arts and Craft Movement and celebration of the industriousness of our county can be seen at the Rahr-West Museum through September 5, 2021.