Call it the Arts and Crafts Revival, Part 2. In the 1980s, the cleanlined, spare, simple style that was born in the late l9th and early 20th Century made a comeback–Hollywood style.
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The rich and famous paid exorbitant prices for original, important pieces. That was the big news.
Barbra Streisand paid $363,000 to Christie’s New York auction house in 1988 fo a Gustav Stickley sideboard-Stickley, of course, being the biggest name in the Arts and Crafts movement in the U.S. It was the sideboard that this American furniture designer made for his own home in Syracuse, N.Y., circa 1903.
These days, though, it’s not celebrities and their hefty pocketbooks that are putting the crafted, almost rustic-looking style back in the news.
It’s everybody else.
It’s Ethan Allen of Danbury, Conn. It’s the L. & J.G. Stickley Co. of Manlius, N.Y. It’s Sawbridge Studio in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.
Open just about any stylish home furnishings catolog. Walk into a furniture store. Visit a museum. Leaf through a glossy home magazine.
Arts and crafts furniture and furnishings are in there. It’s the Revival , Part 2 for real people and their more modest means.
Supplying today’s comeback is a new generation of furniture manufacturers and craftspeople who are reproducing the original designs or reinterpreting them in new pieces of furniture and decorative objects.
The bottom line: If you’re not a purist who insists on getting original pieces, there’s plenty of good Arts and Crafts-inspired furnirure and furnishings out there now and at prices other than exorbitant.
When he built his furniture, Gustav Stickley intended it not to be for just a select few, but for many people who enjoyed the style and enjoyed living with it. The pieces we are making now make it more affordable,” says Aminy Audi.
Audi and her husband, Alfred, are considered to be the bellwether for today’s populist Arts an Crafts Revival, according to one prominent art industry source.
The Audis bought the L. & J.G. Stickley furniture company in 1974. And they bought it as a waning company whose specialty was Early American/Colonial furniture-not Gustav Stickley’s Arts and Crafts furniture, which came to be known as the Mission style.
When Arts and Crafts began to lose favor in the 1920s, the Stickley company revived the Early American/Colonial look. It became the focus of the company, which was then run by Gustav’s less-famous brothers, Leopold and John George.
In 1989, though, the Audis saw a new mission in Mission. They reissued 33 Arts and Crafts pieces, including archival designs by Gustav Stickley.
“The timing was right,” explains Aminy Audi, noting that the high auction prices had something to do with their decision to reintroduce Mission. But so did consumer demand. According to Audi, the company received endless consumer requests calling for the reissue of Stickley Mission.
Today, the Stickley company offers more than 200 Mission oak and Mission cherry pieces. Prices run from about $62 for candlesticks to $10,000 for the limited-edition Columbus Avenue sideboard, which is the Barbra Streisand sideboard minus $353,000.
All total, the Mission pieces represent nearly one-half of the Stickley company’s total production, and Audi expects this part of their business to “continue to grow and be a permanent part of American home furnishings.
On a mission
Arts and Crafts has “gained its place in history,” says McClelland. It’s no longer a look that comes into vogue every now and then, but a style that will remain available and viable, just like Williamsburg of Early American.
Aesthetics has a lot to do with it.
Arts and Crafts is a simple, sturdy style. The design stresses function. Embellishments are stripped away. Materials are unpretentious.
It’s one of those versatile styles. Arts and Crafts furnishings can look Southwestern, contemporary, rustic, depending on the setting and the home.
“What is being rediscovered is good design-the proportions, the construction, the excellent choice of wood,” says John Toomey Gallery in Oak Park, which specializes in 20th Century decorative arts and in Arts and Crafts pieces.
Three years ago, Ethan Allen Interiors Inc., headquartered in Danbury, Conn., with 287 stores nationwide, introduced Arts and Crafts-style pieces in its “American Impressions” collection. Mass-produced, the collection tries to be somewhat true to the period, says M. Farooq Kathwari, Ethan Allen’s chairman. “Ethan Allen decided to create this collection to appeal to a cosumer who likes the clean lines and smplicity of Mission design,” says Kathwari.
Good, clean, honest design is what Arts and Crafts is all about.
The style has roots in 19th Century England, and back then, it was as much a philosophy as it was a decorative look.
Behind it were British writer/historian John Ruskin and his follower William Morris, a British designer, poet and political theorist, among other things.
Ruskin and Morris saw themselves as leaders of a reformist movement whose goal was to comment on the proper integration of art and society.
They believed that the ideal integration occurred during the Middle Ages when craft guilds existed and man empowered design.
Machines and the Industrial Revolution damaged that harmony, and both the decorative arts and society-at-large suffered, according to their doctrine.
Through the handcrafted, simple Arts and Crafts style, followers of this reformist movement made a statement against the Industrial Revolution and against the excesses of the Victorian period.
Some people see a reformist kind of statement in today’s Arts and Crafts Revival.
Cheryl Bachand, interim curator at the Frank Lloyd Write Home and Studio in Oak Park, believes there are similarities between society today and society around the turn of the century.
There were excesses then in the form of Victorian ornateness, and there were excesses of all sorts during the 1980s.
There was a crafts movement then, and there is a crafts movement now.
Put them together and you have two modern societies, both overwrought and both in search of the human touch.
There certainly are lots of humans putting their touch on today’s revival. Following are snapshot profiles of some of he most noteworthy people and companies who are re-pioneering the Arts and Crafts mission:
The handcrafted touch
Sawbridge Studios in River North opened 14 months ago by three former corporate marketers who recognized a need to help craftspeople sell their designs. Among those inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and who sell at Sawbridge Studios:
Mike Maxwell and John Kelly, owners of the Philadelphia-based Maxwell & Kelly Furniture Co., produce their 18-piece collection by hand from black cherry wood with black walnut accents.
Their style is influenced by several master craftsmen-architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (a Scottish architect and furniture designer who made extremely high-backed chairs famous) and the Greene brothers (California architects who made furniture with more ornamentation than Gustav Stickley, sometimes inlaying silver and semiprecious stones and incorporating Chinese detailing).
The Maxwell & Kelly collection has a linear, slightly square look. Proportions are more graceful than original Arts and Crafts pieces and their use of spindles instead of slats makes their work look lighter, more modern.
Prices range from $375 for a stool to $3,700 for a desk.
Meanwhile, Ron Skidmore and Steve Stenger of Prairie Woodworks in Bloomington, Ill., represent a more traditional approach to Arts and Crafts furnishings.
Their 17-piece quartersawn oak collection is fashioned into more masculine designs. Classic details are incorporated, such as wide slats and paddle-shaped armrests. Prices range from $840 for a bedside table to $4,475 for an armoire.
And, Karl Barry, of Brooklyn, N.Y., produces handcrafted Prairie-style floor lamps, ceiling fixtures and wall sconces made of brass bases with different patinas topped by pagoda- or lantern-shaped stained-glass shades. His lamps sell for between $800 and $2,500.
The showroom, at 406 N. Clark St., is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday; 312-828-0055.
By design
The company founded by Gustav Stickley, the leading American disciple of the Arts and Crafts movement, closed about 1915 as he diversified in numerous directions, including publishing a magazine.
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But a separate shop, L. & J.G. Stickley, run by his brothers Leopold and John George, continued with a small staff and limited output into the 1970s.
In 1974, New Yorkers Alfred and Aminy Audi bought the firm, the rights to its original designs and Gustav Stickley’s name.
Today, the company, L. & J.G. Stickley, has 640 employees, is housed in a new plant in Manlius, N.Y., and manufactures 800 furniture designs in quartersawn white oak, cherry and mahogany.
The company’s goal is to be true to the spirit of the period, not manufacture replicas, says Aminy.
The company has added furniture to its repertoire that didn’t exist years ago-television cabinets, entertainment centers and computer desks.
The company also makes lamps in the style of Louis Tiffany’s Art Nouveau stained glass designs.
Prices range from $52 for a breadboard to $10,000 for a copy of Barbra Streisand’s sideboard, which is available in a limited edition of 100. (Seventy have been sold.)
Some of the collection is carried at Toms-Price Co., 303 E. Front St., Wheaton, 708-668-7878.
A $10 catalog is available by writing L. & J.G. Stickley, Stickley Drive, P.O. Box 480, Manlius, N.Y. 13104.
Let there be light
About 1 1/2 years ago, Bob Cohen, owner of Meyda Tiffany lamps in Utica, N.Y., a 20-year-old firm that replicates Tiffany lamps, decided to produce a line that borrowed loosely from the Arts and Crafts/Mission period.
“Our business is to sell decorative lighting, and it was logical,” says Cohen, about his decision to cash in on the revival. “Our customers began demanding the designs.”
The six styles of table and hanging lamps in the company’s Mission series incorporate many features of the originals, such as bold rectilinear shapes, handcrafted stained glass shades and solid brass bases with antique finishes. They come in unlimited color combinations.
The lamps range from $99 to $700 and are at The Little Traveler, 404 S. 3rd St., Geneva, 708-232-4200; and Daffy Down Dilly, 490 N. Main St., Glen Ellyn, 708-858-2241.
Under foot
Tufenkian Import/Export Ventures Inc., headquartered in New York City, may hardly sound American, yet founder James Tufenkian has an Arts and Crafts line of nine rugs with motifs and colors that evoke the period’s spirit.
“The rugs represent new patterns adapted from the period through archival drawings,” says Hyon Su Kwon, Tufenkian’s design assistant.
Patterns are busy groupings of geometric shapes or interconnected organic flora and fauna motifs.
Colors are of the era’s vivid magentas, mahoganies and China blues.
The rugs share another connection with the Arts and Crafts period. They’re all spun, dyed, knotted and trimmed by hand in Nepal rather than machine-made, says Tufenkian.
A 9-by-12-foot rug runs about $5,000.
They’re available at Oscar Isberian Rugs, 1028 Chicago Ave., Evanston, 708-475-0010.
For further information, call Tufenkian Ventures at 800-435-7568.
Picture this
After working in sales for a telecommunication company in the 1980s, Anita Munman returned to school to study Japanese influences on American architecture and art.
Then, when she and her husband, a professor of art history and architecture, decided to remodel their 1912 Craftsman home in Oak Park, they discovered they had little money left to buy art.
So, Munman decided to create her own period-appropriate art. She made ink drawings and gouache paintings based on works by artists of the Arts and Crafts era, many of whom were inspired by the Japanese landscape prints and drawings that flooded this country in the ’20s and ’30s. “There was a mania for things Japanese,” she says. “People were fascinated by the different approach, which wasn’t as symmetrical or realistic.”
Once Munman’s own walls were covered, she placed an ad in Arts & Crafts Quarterly magazine. Sales boomed; a catalog followed.
L. & J.G. Stickely Furniture Co. spotted her work this year and convinced her to sell through its catalog. Munman now has a stable of six artists who produce 35 paintings a week. “They’re in the style of the Arts and Crafts, influenced by Japanese woodblock prints with simple trees, swamp and bark plants, bugs and beetles,” she says.
Artwork comes matted, mounted and framed and costs $400 to $800. For a catalog on the artwork, send $5 to: L. & J.G. Stickley Furniture Co., Stickley Drive, Box 480, Manlius, N.Y. 13104.
Campus life
The Roycroft Campus in East Aurora, N.Y., was established by businessman, social reformer and magazine publisher Elbert Hubbard in 1895, after he met William Morris, the 19th Century British designer, painter and poet who was a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Hubbard wanted to be Morris’ American counterpart and formed Roycroft.
During Roycroft’s peak, between 1895 and 1925, 500 people worked in 14 buildings and produced hand-bound leather books, pottery, copper, ironworks and furniture.
Finished goods were marked with “R” and were retailed through gift shops and department stores, including Marshall Field & Co. Though Hubbard died when the Lusitania sank in 1915, his son kept the studio going until 1938, after which it fell into disrepair.
In the 1970s, the campus began to come alive again.
Only pottery, by Janice McDuffie, is still made on the campus today.
She originally made classic vase and bowl shapes with earth-tone matte glazes. But, in 1990, after a trip to England, McDuffiee added carved and applied figures to her designs for a three-dimensional look and made them in more muted glazes of hunter and grass green, mottled gray and cobalt blue.
Her designs are sold under the Roycroft Potters name and retail for $90 to $300. A brochure is available by writing: Janice McDuffie, 37 S. Grove St., East Aurora, N.Y. 14052.
Tile
Ann Sacks Tile & Stone, a Portland, Ore.-based tile showroom, which recently opened at 501 N. Wells St., introduced a tile series that features linear, floral and Deco designs borrowed loosely from tile designs of the Arts and Crafts period.
The tiles come in 22 soft matte glazes, including four shades of white, a rich ocher, deep slate gray, Wedgwood blue and deep eggplant.
“Ann (a former English teacher who had a vision for tile and built a tile company in Portland in 1981) created the (softer) glazes because clients wanted to move away from slick, high-gloss tiles,” says Mary Dugan, manager of the Chicago showroom.
“There’s a trend toward softer colors, which are more understated,” she says. “But, there’s also a depth because of the two-stage process (the under-color and over-color), which is the way the original tiles were made. The color underneath comes through.”
The line also includes relief or three-dimensional tiles with borders that simulate knots, medieval animals and leaves. There also are separate border tiles with a molded or sculptural look.
Tile sizes ranges from 1-by-1-inch to 6-by-6-inches. Prices are $32 a square foot for the smallest and $20 a square foot for the largest. Shop hours are 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday; 312-923-0919.
Clocks
Formerly a craftsman of Renaissance and Baroque musical instruments and a computer software consultant, Paul Kemner of Toledo returned to making furniture 1 1/2 years ago, producing mantel clocks based on Gustav Stickley designs.
“It seemed like there was a need,” says Kemner. “A lot of the Arts and Crafts clocks that survived weren’t good designs and were clunky and crude. The ones that were great are very rare and expensive.”
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Kemner’s mantel clocks are housed in simple, slightly tapered quartersawn white oak boxes, with tops and bases that protrude. He says he is striving for accuracy with his designs, although “not down to the millimeter.”
Kemner burns his name and date in his clocks to make sure they’re not confused with the originals.
The most expensive 18-inch-high mantel clock retails for $650; the least expensive is a $70 7-inch model. He also does custom work, including desks, folding screens and end tables.
A catalog of Kemner’s designs is available by sending a $3 check or money order to: 2829 Rockwood, Toledo, Ohio 43610-1625. Or, call him at 419-241-8278.
His designs also are sold at East Road Gallery in Lakeside, Mich., and at the Gambel House, the famous Arts and Crafts museum in Pasadena, Calif.