WOODENWORKS
FURNITURE OBJECTS BY FIVE CONTEMPORARY CRAFTSMEN
Joshua Taylor [foreword]
[Nakashima, Maloof, Esherick, Carpenter and Castle] Joshua Taylor [foreword]: WOODENWORKS -- FURNITURE OBJECTS BY FIVE CONTEMPORARY CRAFTSMEN. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Museum of Art with the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, 1972. First edition [imited to 2,900 copies]. Square quarto. Thick printed fold-out wrappers. 48 pp. 41 black and white illustrations. Vitaes and bibliography. Cloth tape reinforced spine. Grubby covers. Textblock thumbed. A good copy of this important catalog.
8.5 x 9.5 perfect-bound catalog with 48 pages and 41 black and white images showcasing the wood work of George Nakashima, Sam Maloof, Wharton Esherick, Arthur Espenet Carpenter and Wendell Castle. Exhibition catalog for a show at the Smithsonian National Collection of Fine Arts Renwick Gallery from January 28 to July 19, 1972. The show then travelled to the Minnesota Museum of Art. Includes vitae and an extensive bibliography.
From the catalog:
George Nakashima (1905-1990) was born in Spokane, Washington in 1905. He studied Forestry and Architecture at the University of Washington, attended the Ecole Americaine des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau, and earned his Masters in Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1929. His love of wood and his instinctive feeling about the right way to handle materials led him to seek beyond his training as an architect. After graduating he went abroad, spending a year in France, then going to India and Japan where he worked with architects, woodworkers, and carpenters to learn their methods.
Returning to the United States in the early 1940s, Nakashima compared architectural practice here with the careful craft methods of Oriental building and decided architecture could not be his lifework. He resolved to "get into something that I could handle from beginning to end." Believing that design in architecture or furniture begins with materials and structure, and that design is proved in the making of a thing, he felt that as a builder of furniture he could maintain his standards of design and craftsmanship.
A long period of struggle followed that decision. Plans were interrupted by internment with his family in a World War II relocation center, but Nakashima refined his furniture-building techniques during this time by working with a carpenter who had been trained in Japan. In 1943 the family was released and moved to resettle in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where slowly he built his shop and home on several acres of hilly woodland.
In time his furniture attracted customers and by 1949 he was established as a designer and builder of fine, handcrafted furniture. He has never advertised nor sought publicity, yet demand for his furniture increased and his business grew to the twelve-workman shop he is responsible for today.
Nakashima places emphasis on the best use of a beautiful piece of wood in the simple forms which he evolved from both Japanese and early American tradition. His long apprenticeship and his deep reverence for wood are combined in the creation of timeless pieces of simplicity, pure line, and sensitive proportion. He works "from the characteristics of the material and methods of construction outwards, to produce an integrated and honest object."
Making a profit has never been a first consideration. Overriding every other intention is the feeling that "craftsmanship is not only a creative force, but a moral idea … design is only something to realize a way of life." One aspect of this way of life is to give quality. "We feel that we should give value.… We follow these precepts of doing a good job which is rather important in our age."
Nakashima wishes his New Hope shop to grow no larger. He would like to find time for some special projects—like the little palace. An outspoken critic of design and construction methods in architecture, he will accept only those special architectural commissions which offer him an opportunity to build as he believes.
Nakashima is deeply rooted in American design and historic traditions, and also has for many years carried out his own people-to-people projects in India and Japan. There, under his design and technical guidance, furniture related to each country and its craftsmanship is made, to be sold locally and abroad. Such projects as these, he hopes, will increase knowledge of fine woodworking methods in America and restore standards of craftsmanship being eroded in the Orient, for "if we can restore a little of … fine concepts and attitudes and fine workmanship to Japan … and if we can introduce the same thing here, I mean, it becomes rather universal. One borrows from another, which is the way I think culture should be."
Sam Maloof was born in 1916 in Chino, California, to Lebanese immigrant parents. He began making furniture in 1949, after working as a graphic artist in industry, serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, and working as a studio assistant to the artist-designer Millard Sheets, of Claremont, California. During the 1950s, he was a key member of the innovative, Los Angeles-area modern design movement; his work was included in the annual "California Design" shows, as well as other exhibits of contemporary-style home furnishings. With its warm tones, hand-sculpted details, and simple, timeless designs, Maloof's walnut furniture perfectly complemented the spare, open-plan interiors of the sleek, modernist Southern California residences built during that decade. Leading West Coast architects and decorators, as well as style-conscious homeowners, regularly ordered pieces from his small, one-man workshop, and his classic design attracted nationwide attention in the press.
In 1957 the American Craft Museum in New York launched its first exhibition of studio craft furniture, "Furniture by Craftsmen," and Maloof was invited to participate. The same year, he also attended the first national conference of the American Crafts Council (ACC) at Asilomar, California. As crafts gained popularity and credibility on both coasts, Sam discovered he was part of a thriving national movement. At Asilomar, participants discovered their shared dedication to working with their hands in an increasingly technological society. Maloof soon emerged as a leader; he served for a quarter century as an ACC trustee and during that time spoke and wrote tirelessly to promote the moral and spiritual values of handcraftsmanship. In 1969 he expressed his credo: "I want to be able to work a piece of wood into an object that contributes something beautiful and useful to our everyday living. To be able to work with materials without destroying their natural beauty and warmth, to be able to work as we want—that is a God-given privilege."
By 1970, Sam Maloof was acknowledged to be a leading member of the first generation of post-World War II studio furniture makers. These pioneers shared an aesthetic based on a modernist reverence for the beauty of solid hardwoods, a love of simple, sculptural shapes, a rejection of applied ornament and historical style, and above all, a dedication to function. Their influence remains strong among the postmodern "second generation" of studio furniture makers, even though this group employs mixed materials, creates personally expressive or historically based pieces, and often rejects function. For this generation, the quality of Maloof's work and the success of his business operation confirmed that woodworking was a viable way of life.
Wharton Harris Esherick (1887-1970) was born in Philadelphia in 1887 and studied at that city's School of Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Esherick's work in wood, beginning in the mid-1920s, reflected the time he lived through. His style evolved through carved surfaces and complex line with angular planes until he developed the sensitive shaping of curved form imbued with energetic life that became his own way with wood. For as he said, "Some of my sculpture went into the making of furniture."
He took particular joy in the interaction of idea and material, the play of blending a furniture form he had in mind with the natural variations he found in the wood. A crack might be sanded to emphasize its shape, a knot might be left higher than the surrounding surface to become a point of tactile interest, the very conception of his design could be directed by the flow of grain in a piece of wood.
At first he worked by himself, but as demand for his special kind of design grew, so did his workshop, which in time became fully mechanized, for Esherick welcomed the help of useful tools. Perhaps because he was first of all an artist, and because he considered the hand as another tool, he believed that handcraft was secondary to design, though craftsman he was. He put into his work "a little of the hand, but the main thing is the heart and the head." In his own mind, Wharton Esherick was simply a man who made furniture "under personal supervision and with personal concern." He worked with a varying number of helpers and left to them much of the joinery and finishing, keeping for himself only the special wood problems requiring his own hand and judgment. In 1969, a year before his death, he was "still shaping the seats of the stools. The boys just don't get the hang of it."
During his enormously productive life as a woodworker, Esherick completed many interiors. Some, like his rooms for the Curtis Bok house in Gulph Mills near Philadelphia, are counted among the most important interiors of the 1930s; but his masterwork is the house he built for himself near Paoli, Pensylvania. There on a wooded hillside he laid the stone foundations for his home and studio in 1926 and spent the rest of his life working on it, seldom even wanting to go away for a visit. He liked best to use the wood native to his own land, believing that "if I can't make something beautiful out of what I find in my back yard, I had better not make anything." Long hours went into improving and finishing his house until in time the house seemed to become Esherick. Of it he said, "I am only Esherick the man, but all of this is really Esherick." The house exemplifies his sculptural concepts; it is filled with patient and thoughtful and often humorous detailing of walls, doors, ceiling, floors, and bult-in seating and beds. He furnished it with his own sculpture and furniture prototypes, for he kept "number one" of any design himself.
Esherick did not accept apprentices, declaring, "I make, I don't teach," but his work is a recognized influence on the course of wood craftsmanship in America. Sam Maloof and Wendell Castle each acknowledge Esherick as the man whose work proved to them woodworing could be important and expressive.
Arthur Espenet Carpenter was born in New York City in 1920. He earned a B.A. in Economics and English from Dartmouth in 1942, then entered the Navy for four years, "giving me plenty of time to think of whether I wanted to end up in Wall Street or in my father's business, or whatever." After World War II he worked in the Oriental art importing business and decided he wanted to be "a part of the making, the production business. I wanted a physical job, some kind that would allow me to express myself creatively." So, just to see if he could do it, he moved to San Francisco, bought a lathe and with no idea of becoming a craftsman—rather to make things, sell them, and be independent—he began making wooden bowls and other treen ware.
In a few years his bowls were being sold at select stores across the county and when his work was chosen for the Museum of Modern Art's Good Design Exhibits in 1950, Carpenter discovered the world of crafts and craftsmen. Continuing to produce wooden bowls he slowly taught himself the necessary skills and acquired machinery for making furniture—wooden forms with greater creative possibilities.
By the mid-50s Carpenter found himself with a thriving custom furniture buisness with six employees and no time to build any pieces himself. "I was becoming just what I was running away from … the business man, waiting on customers, doing the selling, and telling the employees what to do."
To restore what he considered a lost balance, he moved his family to Bolinas, California where, after a lean first year, customers began coming to his rural location. Not knowing in the beginning that it would take eight years to finish, Carpenter decided to build a house. With an architect's plan for a basic guide "so I'd know what beams would hold up what," and with wood from an old barn on the hilltop property he slowly built a unique circular house near his shop.
Under the name "Espenet" he accepts church and library commissions but feels his shop is better scaled to special orders from individuals. Eleven months of the year he works with his three workmen producing furniture, saving the twelfth month for a rest period, a time to work out new designs. A half-dozen of these new designs may be put in his showroom for customers to see.
Much of his work is one-of-a-kind pieces. Some customers simply designate what they need and give him freedom to proceed as he likes, others ask for a sketch or model first. Many come to his showroom for the first time, to order perhaps a dining room table, return in a year for eight chairs to go with it, and later for other pieces, "so, in time I find that once I sell something to a customer, I'm selling to the same customer for the next five, six years."
A primitive directiness and strength characterizes Carpenter's furniture, and seeing no point in "making ivory balls within ivory balls," he tries to find the most economic use of time and material.
"My whole thing has been utility. If it isn't comfortable and if it doesn't last and if it doesn't function, it's no good. Furniture to me is something the body touches." He makes a direct appeal to the senses by providing smooth, rounded surfaces for the hand, comfort for the body, contrasting and richly grained woods for the eye, and by using unfinished Japanese oak in cabinets because of that wood's pleasant odor, something for the nose.
Wendell Keith Castle was born in Emporia, Kansas in 1932. He attended the University of Kansas to earn a BFA in Industrial Design. "I could see after a brief industrial design job that no one was really interested in making things of sort of experimental or unusual nature … the only way I could make what I wanted to make was to make it myself."
"At that point I went into sculpture … and some of these pieces … quite by accident ended up by looking a bit like strange pieces of furniture with seats at the wrong heights and things like this.… That idea interested me and I began to go in that direction." Castle graduated from the from the University of Kansas with a MFA in Sculpture in 1961, moved to Rochester, New York, and began teaching at the School of American Craftsmen, Rochester Institute of Technology.
He proceeded to build up "a working vocabulary with wood" until he could make what he wanted in the way of sculptural forms that are useful as furniture. Castle's furniture concepts evolve chiefly from concern with support and are realized through three different approaches. The first is to treat the support, or base, sculpturally and as one with the sides and top, letting its form grow up and down and around like a living thing. The second is to allow a small base, anchor it to the floor, and— like a plant that will "come up with one very small stalk and still have lots of flowers,"—have it support several functional units of chair, table, lamp, desk, etc. The third approach is to eliminate a base entirely and fasten to the wall or ceiling a sculptural support that flows into useful surfaces of table or chair. The first approach is usually applied to separate, free-standing pieces of furniture; the second and third only can be used in more or less permanent installations.
Because laminating so greatly increases the natural strength of wood, Castle can make extraordinary demands on the wood he uses. His designs begin in the sketch book and most furniture pieces begin with an inch-thick layer of perfectly smoothed wood, growing upward course by course until a rough form is built, very close to finished size. He carves the convex areas with a chain saw dragged over the surface, and finishes with power chisels, routers, and other tools to make the subtle changes "you make because you want the piece really perfect." The final, week-long sanding job he turns over to his one helper. Castle works on several pieces at a time, moving from one to another as he sees clearly what to do next on each.
From the beginning Wendell Castle's work has been impossible to categorize, combining as it does a blend of sculpture and furniture that cannot be comfortably defined as one or the other. His layered creations built of countless individual pieces of wood become strikingly tree-like in their deliberate roundness and strong, slow curves. Castle defines his work as sculpture, with an added ingredient—"it performs some useful function in addition to, I hope, being beautiful."
As the youngest of this group of five contemporary craftsmen, Wendell Castle reflects changes in our educational system that today make it simpler to find a vocation as a craftsman. He is a person completely at home in what he does. Now living in Scottsville, he is Chairman of the Sculpture Department at the State University of New York in Brockport. In addition to teaching, Castle works continually on commissioned pieces and experiments with new ideas, recently introducing plastic furniture forms to be made and sold in signed editions.