The ideals of the contract furniture designer, effectively an industrial designer, are far removed from those of the furniture artisan, the craftsman-designer who finds in the creation of finely hand-finished pieces an intimate, even poetic form of expression. A respect for craft and a respect for tradition have long characterized the approach to furniture of the less heavily industrialized Scandinavian countries. In other countries of Europe and in the United States, where the domestic landscape has become dominated by the machine-made, furniture design had, in the eyes of the new generation of craftsmen, become depersonalized.
Craft work has been described as a mediation between the purely practical and the purely artistic.
"Handcraftmanship", wrote Octavio Paz in In Praise of Hands of 1974, "is a sort of fiesta of the object: it transforms the everyday utensil into a sign of participation." It is a philosophy which has strong echoes of Ruskin and Morris, though today's most prominent furniture craftsmen-designers realistically accept that their clients will be the minority who can afford costly hand work and not the Utopian masses at whom Morris's promises, if not his creations, were aimed.
The leaders of the current craft revival in furniture see in the regeneration of traditional skills a means of preserving standards which could all too easily be lost and an opportunity to instill in a new generation of artisans a sense of commitment and a sense of involvement in the creation of their environment, values which are in jeopardy in an increasingly mechanized world.
A respected pioneer of the craft furniture movement is Wharton Esherick, who died in 1970 but whose influence is very much alive. Setting up a hillside retreat near Philadelphia in 1913, he proceeded to carve all the furniture and furnishings which he needed. He has been described as the direct descendant of the Shaker tradition. His was the saying, `A little of the hand, but the main thing is the heart and the head.'
Probably the most influential figure in American craft furniture today, both as practitioner and teacher, is Wendell Castle, a worthy inheritor of Esherick's mantle. Castle, born in 1932, studied industrial design and sculpture at the University of Kansas, graduating in 1961. Evolving a highly personal style of furniture, he has been the subject of numerous one-man shows and is now represented in major museum collections across the United States. His characteristic approach is to carve out the form of his furniture, usually in swollen and undulating contours, from massive blocks of wood built up in layers. 'My firm', he writes, 'is really quite small, and might most appropriately be characterized as an extension of myself as an artist and designer ... Everything produced in my workshop is designed, personally supervized and signed by me.'
Another great exponent of the highly sculptural style of American craft furniture is Michael Coffey who, from his workshops in Poultney, Vermont, produces sensual organic forms in rich, polished, often exotic woods, such as walnut, mozambique, rosewood, marnut and cherry.
In a 1976 survey of the craft scene, John Makepeace illustrated the work of other Americans whose eccentric sculpted forms evoke the extravagant organic forms of French Art Nouveau, or the baroque Art Nouveau of Gaudi; these included Roy Superior, Peter Danko, Sam Forrest and Stephen Hogbin. Less elaborate, and less costly, is the work of Paul Epp, a craftsman whose straightforward but carefully considered and well-made furniture is designed with price accessibility as an important factor. On Art Nouveau, read more here.
Source: Philippe Garner, Twentieth-Century FurnitureNew York: Van Nostrand, 1980, page 206.
An exhibition of nineteenth-century American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970 had a salutary effect on rehabilitating that century's artistic reputation. Then, in 1972, an exhibition titled "The Arts and Crafts Movement in America: 1876-1916" took place at Princeton University and traveled to Chicago and Washington, D.C. The show and an accompanying catalogue were sparks that ignited an interest that has only grown stronger.