From October 11 through January 4, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art will present “At Home with Gustav Stickley: Arts and Crafts from the Stephen Gray Collection.” The exhibition will feature approximately 140 works from a major private collection and related pieces from the museum’s permanent collections. It will include classic Stickley furniture in the Craftsman tradition, along with important Arts and Crafts pottery, metalwork and prints.
Gustav Stickley was largely responsible for promoting the Craftsman aesthetic and the American Arts and Crafts movement. The focus was affordable fine crafts with authentic local workmanship and simple design. This was a marked change from Victorian excess that had been popular previously, where decoration had no relationship to the form and structure of the furniture.
The exhibit will feature rare early examples of Stickley’s finest furniture designs from 1901 to 1905 and art pottery by some of the leading makers. Objects typically found in Arts and Crafts homes †color woodblock prints by Arthur Wesley Dow and his followers, pictorial photography, Edward Curtis photogravures from The North American Indian , art pottery, Arts and Crafts-inspired textiles and Native American baskets from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum †will be grouped in roomlike settings.
Gray began collecting Arts and Crafts works in the 1970s. Since that time he has assembled rare early pieces produced by the seminal Stickley, as well as pottery, metalwork and works on paper that reflect the aesthetic promoted in Stickley’s Craftsman magazines and other period publications.
The Arts and Crafts movement, rooted in late Nineteenth Century Britain, espoused the principle of unity in the arts, believing that all creative endeavor was of equal value. There was a desire both to reform design but also to return quality to the process of making objects. The Arts and Crafts reformers wanted to reestablish a harmony between architect, designer and craftsman, in order to produce well crafted, well designed, affordable, everyday objects.
Stickley’s Craftsman furnishings epitomized Arts and Crafts design in America. Most Stickley furniture was made of quartersawn white oak, a very heavy, dense wood that imparted a quality of spiritual beauty that strongly beckoned to future generations. Traditional cabinetmaking techniques were used both structurally and as ornament, including mortise and tenon, bevel, key, peg, butterfly joint and dovetail. The pieces were then finished to look aged and mellow. The Gray collection includes rare early examples of Stickley’s finest furniture designs with pieces dating from the seminal years of 1901‱905.
Complementing Stickley’s production was the art pottery and tiles by makers like Overbeck, Marblehead, Walrath, Grueby, Saturday Evening Girls and Newcomb College, all of whom are well represented in the Gray collection. Common attributes include the geometric interpretation, conventionalization and simplification of natural forms, and soft, muted colors.
This pottery was informed by the theories of the artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow, who articulated an aesthetic that became the basis for the American Arts and Crafts movement in all aspects of applied and fine art. The Atheneum’s exhibition will include fine examples of Dow’s color woodblock prints.
“At Home with Gustav Stickley” will be accompanied by a full-color catalog with essays by Stephen Gray, David Cathers and Tommy McPherson.
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is at 600 Main Street. For information, www.wadsworthatheneum.org or 860-278-2670.
