Volume 1
Quilts and Textiles • Ceramics • Silver •Weaponry • Furniture • Vernacular Architecture • Native American Art

 

The chair—you’re likely sitting in one right now. Yet, despite its common presence in offices, restaurants, and homes, we very rarely stop to think about the origins of the chair and its place in culture. After all, the human body is actually more suited to sitting on the ground than on a chair; and as a result, chairs often cause back problems. Nonetheless, in Western culture, as Anne Massey explains, the chair is an object that marks our place in the modern world.

Massey explores how, particularly in the last hundred years, the chair has become a revered object of design. Certain chairs have become iconic—like the Eames Lounge chair and Verner Panton’s S Chair, which are photographed, exhibited in art museums, and slavishly copied by cheaper models. Other chairs have reached iconic status simply through their everydayness—think of Van Gogh’s chair or the way Shaker chairs have become emblematic of a simpler and purer lifestyle. Massey further examines how chairs have been crafted, from local to global manufacture. In doing so she elucidates the meaning of the chair in contemporary culture, as well as the development, design, and manufacture of this ubiquitous object.

Drawing on design, art, popular culture, and personal experience, Chair is an engaging and informative biography of this everyday object and will appeal to anyone interested in why we choose to sit on the chairs we do.

A history of how Danish design rose to prominence in the postwar United States, becoming shorthand for stylish modern comfort.

Today, Danish Modern design is synonymous with clean, midcentury cool. During the 1950s and ‘60s, it flourished as the furniture choice for Americans who hoped to signal they were current and chic. But how did this happen? How did Danish Modern become the design movement of the times? In The Chieftain and the Chair, Maggie Taft tells the tale of our love affair with Danish Modern design. Structured as a biography of two iconic chairs—Finn Juhl’s Chieftain Chair and Hans Wegner’s Round Chair, both designed and first fabricated in 1949—this book follows the chairs from conception and fabrication through marketing, distribution, and use.

Drawing on research in public and private archives, Taft considers how political, economic, and cultural forces in interwar Denmark laid the foundations for the postwar furniture industry, and she tracks the deliberate maneuvering on the part of Danish creatives and manufacturers to cater to an American market. Taft also reveals how American tastemakers and industrialists were eager to harness Danish design to serve American interests and how furniture manufacturers around the world were quick to capitalize on the fad by flooding the market with copies.

Sleek and minimalist, Danish Modern has experienced a resurgence of popularity in the last few decades and remains a sought-after design. This accessible and engaging history offers a unique look at its enduring rise among tastemakers.

 

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum’s significant collection of French Rococo ébénisterie furniture.

This catalogue focuses on French ébénisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum’s founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976.
 
The Museum’s collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696–ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694–1763), and Jean-François Oeben (1721–1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste.
 
The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection’s acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/rococo/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

Speaking of Furniture: Conversations with 14 American Masters is a fresh, stimulating, and in-depth examination of the modus operandi of 14 accomplished—and diverse—furniture makers. An engaging history of studio furniture, this colorful, informative study includes engaging conversations with James Krenov, Wendell Castle, Jere Osgood, Judy Kensley McKie, David Ebner, Richard Scott Newman, Hank Gilpin, Alphonse Mattia, John Dunnigan, Wendy Maruyama, James Schriber, Timothy S. Philbrick, Michael Hurwitz, and Thomas Hucker. The insightful interviews illuminate how these creative and gifted craftspeople arrived professionally and what their craft means to them individually. In his enlightening foreword, Edward S. Cooke, Jr. maps out the background of the studio furniture movement. Author and furnituremaker Roger Holmes offers an insider’s perspective on the art and craft of producing exquisite contemporary furniture in his conversational introduction and maintains, “Art or craft, this is very personal work.” This elegant presentation skillfully sheds light on the thought processes and techniques of a celebrated and exceptional gathering of studio furniture makers who are as unique as they are stellar. As sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle remarks, “What I admired was that . . . fine art and craft were the same thing.”

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas Furniture and its makers. They spent more than a decade working with museums and private collectors throughout the state to examine and photograph representative examples. They also combed census records, newspapers, and archives for information about cabinetmakers. These efforts resulted in the 1975 publication of Texas Furniture, which quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject.

Now updated with an expanded Index of Texas Cabinetmakers that includes information that has come to light since the original publication and corrects errors, Texas Furniture presents a catalog of more than two hundred pieces of furniture, each superbly photographed and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. The book also includes chapters on the material culture of nineteenth-century Texas and on the tools and techniques of nineteenth-century Texas cabinetmakers, with a special emphasis on the German immigrant cabinetmakers of the Hill Country and Central Texas. The index of Texas cabinetmakers contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, and appendices list information on the state’s largest cabinet shops taken from the United States census records.

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas furniture and its makers. After more than a decade of investigation, they published Texas Furniture in 1975, and it quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject. An updated edition, Texas Furniture, Volume One, was issued in the spring of 2012.

Texas Furniture, Volume Two presents over 150 additional pieces of furniture that were not included in Volume One, each superbly photographed in color and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. Taylor and Warren have also written a new introduction for this volume, in which they amplify the story of early Texas furniture. In particular, they compare and contrast the two important traditions of cabinetmaking in Texas, Anglo-American and German, and identify previously unknown artisans. The authors also discuss nineteenth-century Texans’ desire for refinement and gentility in furniture, non-commercial furniture making, and marquetry work. And they pay tribute to the twentieth-century collectors who first recognized the value of locally made Texas furniture and worked to preserve it. A checklist of Texas cabinetmakers, which contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, completes the volume.

Sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle (1932–2018) carved a distinct path in furniture making over nearly six decades of a distinguished career, and this long-awaited recording of his oeuvre, Wendell Castle: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958–2012, beautifully presents the extraordinary scope of his artistry and craftsmanship. The voluminous accounting of his works, beginning with Castle’s earliest, mid-century works through to his unabashed experiments with unconventional materials (gel-coated fiberglass and metallic automobile paint) and his latest signature wood laminations, is comprehensive and detailed. Three essays of varying perspectives introduce the catalogue raisonné followed by an extensive accounting of his enormous oeuvre, his exhibitions, numerous awards, and the collections of his works, as well as a substantive bibliography. With his organic and whimsical approach to his various mediums, he seamlessly merged sculpture and design into one discipline, obscuring the distinction between the two. He invented the technique of carving stacked laminations of wood, and his later explorations into the qualities of fiberglass as a sculptural medium are unparalleled. Castle is widely collected and his works are in the permanent collections of more than 40 museums and cultural institutions around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Museum of Modern Art (New York); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (Quebec, Canada); and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).Castle has also been the recipient of many honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants, three honorary degrees, the American Craft Council Gold Medal, and a Life-time Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.