“The Rohlfs style is something new and it belongs in a class by itself. Try your best and you cannot place it in association with anything else,” exuded magazine author Will Clemens in 1900 in regard to the unique furnishings designed and executed by Charles Rohlfs during the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Unmistakable in style and form, they are truly as individual as the man who created them.
His pieces are often categorically lumped into the simplistic forms of the Arts and Crafts Movement by today’s collectors. The furniture maker, however, emphatically denied links or similarities of his elaborately carved forms to the Victorian, medieval or Art Nouveau periods, and most especially to the Arts and Crafts Movement.
“My designs are my own. I evolve them. They are like those of no other period nor people…I do not read Ruskin nor anybody nor anything that might influence my ideas. I never get them from books…They are mine and into their execution I put all my heart and force and that is why they appeal,” Rohlfs stated unconditionally in a January 1900 article published in House Beautiful.
Rohlfs regarded himself an American original and, in fact, he was, thereby making it hard to place him into any one descriptive category, something akin to fitting the proverbial square peg into the round hole.
He claimed that his individual inspiration came from the natural grain of oak in conjunction with his own arty imagination, terming his creations “Artistic Furniture” or, simply, “The Rohlfs Style.”
“American Originals: The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs,” the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the furniture maker, takes steps to define and explore the iconic furniture maker. Organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) , the Chipstone Foundation and the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation (ADAF), the exhibition is curated by ADAF curator Joseph Cunningham and organized in Milwaukee by Sarah Fayen, Chipstone’s curator.
The exhibition recently began its five-venue national tour at MAM and is on view there through August 23. It brings together more than 45 examples from Rohlfs’ rich body of works, while also presenting new and exciting research compiled from the Rohlfs family archives, much of which has now been donated to Winterthur, forming the core of the Charles Rohlfs Archive at the Winterthur Library.
Charles Rohlfs was born in 1853, the son of a German immigrant who worked as a cabinetmaker for piano companies in Brooklyn, N.Y. He trained in drafting and design at the Cooper Union in New York City, later becoming a successful patternmaker of cast-iron stoves. His woodcarving skills were brought to the surface and finely honed over the years as he carved the intricately designed wooden forms that would ultimately be used as molds for the stoves.
Rohlfs initially appeared in the Brooklyn City Directory as a “patternmaker,” although, reflecting his admiration for the stage, he changed that to “actor” in 1881. Soon after, he married the successful mystery novelist Anna Katharine Green in 1884 .
Although acting appeared to be his first love and he performed in theatrical events throughout the region, Rohlfs never really left the patternmaking business, ultimately returning to it on a full-time basis.
His role in the stove-making process expanded over the years to include aspects in the design process. He would eventually apply for and be granted three patents in 1886 and 1887 for stove-making innovations.
“Rohlfs’ success with these patents seems to have been the catalyst for bringing him and his family to Buffalo” in 1887, writes Fayen in the introduction to the book accompanying the exhibition, The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs.
“By the summer of 1888, the Rohlfs family was settled into their new home on Tracy Street,” conveys Cunningham. “They were prospering in their respective careers and growing in the esteem of the social circles of the bustling city around them.”
A six-month sojourn through Europe in 1890 after the death of his wife’s father proved to be a channel for Rohlfs’ future endeavors. Sketching arched windows and architecture in the family diary, an invigorated Rohlfs returned home with a new enthusiasm and was “launched into a decade of explosive aesthetic production.”
“It was in this artistically charged environment that Rohlfs began to make furniture,” writes Fayen.
“Modest to say the least, the first ‘workshop’ to be maintained by Rohlfs was located in the attic of the family’s home,” states Cunningham. “In his first ‘professional’ attempt at the design and execution of decorative art, Charles seems to have ‘fashioned a desk for the use of his wife.”‘ The desk, pictured in a period image in the exhibition catalog, reveals Rohlfs’ developed style.
Dissatisfied with the furniture that he and his wife could afford, Rohlfs would recount some 40 years after making the desk, “We needed furniture, so I began making it.”
Rohlfs recalled in a turn-of-the-century interview that Supreme Court Justice Louis B. Hart, who was living nearby, “came up into the attic one day and watched me work. Then he asked me to buy a piece I had made.” While Rohlfs refused the justice’s request, he instead made him a custom desk, and he became Rohlfs’ “first customer,” circa 1897‱898.
The Rohlfs’ entire home was eventually filled with the furniture that he had made. New scholarship reveals that the design process was a collaborative effort shared by Rohlfs and his wife. The pair’s creativity was incorporated into all aspects of the structure, including interior architectural features, built-in cabinetry and paneling and, naturally, all of the furnishings.
Rohlfs’ furniture designs were so distinctive that many guests upon visiting his home commissioned him to create similar furnishings. Once Rohlfs realized that people would purchase the items that he had created as a hobby, he changed his directory listing to “Artistic Furniture.”
It was not until his mid-40s that he began to produce furniture professionally, sometime around 1897. “Almost everything in my life seemed to point toward this work. I can but wonder and regret that it took me so long to find out that this was what I truly was meant to do,” he lamented in a 1900 interview.
In 1898, Rohlfs opened his first shop geared toward commercial production and although it was still an “upstairs space,” it was reported at the time to be an improvement over his previous attic workshop.
Little is known about Rohlfs’ furniture shop, although it is known that it was filled with skilled cabinetmakers who shared his desire for carving and his artistic endeavors, both of which deviated from the popular style and forms of the period.
“Within two years of establishing himself as a furniture maker,” writes Cunningham, “Rohlfs began work on the recursive production of two pieces of furniture, the only important forms he ever made on a significant scale. The ‘Graceful Writing Set’ consists of a carved and fretted tall back chair and a carved and fretted fall front desk that rotates on its footed base. These two objects have become Rohlfs’ most iconic works.”
“Many furniture-makers in the American Arts and Crafts Movement distrusted ornamentation, which was an essential feature of Rohlfs’ oeuvre,” writes Bruce Barnes, the founder and president of AFAD, in the book’s foreword. “In some of Rohlfs’ best work, the form is the ornamentation and the ornamentation is the form. In contrast, in many of Gustav Stickley’s best pieces, all that there is or is needed is the form.”
While some of Rohlfs’ stylistic roots were seemingly gleaned in part from the Aesthetic Movement, his style was also closely related to the abstract naturalism of the Art Nouveau period, simultaneously drawing on influences seen in Asian, Moorish, English and Germanic designs, say the historians. In turn, his work influenced the pared-down oak forms that became hallmarks of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Barnes presents the case that Rohlfs’ work was not overwhelmingly prejudiced by the various periods, making the case that he was probably influenced instead by Louis Sullivan’s stylization of naturalistic imagery, which was prolific by 1885. “His work is perhaps best understood as the culmination of Nineteenth Century forces, including the Aesthetic Movement and prevailing taste for eclecticism and exoticism,” he writes.
“Surprisingly, his earliest surviving works, made around 1888, long before the Arts and Crafts Movement became a force in the United States, exhibit many characteristics of his mature style. These early works, in fact, were very influential on some of Gustav Stickley’s first pieces of furniture in the Arts and Crafts style,” writes Barnes.
Rohlfs’ stylistic trefoil table and a related example “have important connections to the series of ‘ten flower tables’ produced by Gustav Stickley around 1900,” writes Cunningham. In exploring the sources of Craftsman design, Arts and Crafts period historian and author David Cathers “first noted the link between Rohlfs’ work and Stickley’s floriform tables, as well as other influences by Rohlfs on Stickley’s early designs.”
Although Rohlfs was determined to make his small furniture-making business profitable, and despite publishing a portfolio in 1907, well past the prime of the business, many of his best works went unsold, never finding a willing clientele. Many of the unsold items reportedly ended up as furnishings in Rohlfs’ own home.
Late in life, Rohlfs was said to have readily accepted the credit for creating the “Mission” style, although he continued to profess that he actually created the “Rohlfs Style,” a style that was and will always be distinctly his own.
Rohlfs’ unique and imaginative designs place him squarely among the most creative furniture makers of his time. His furniture designs and commissioned interiors reveal his individual artistic vision.
Before his death in 1936, Rohlfs was a widely recognized name within the furniture industry, having exhibited at international exhibitions throughout America and Europe. He had also been admitted to the Royal Society of Arts in London. His furniture was marketed through prestigious outlets such as Marshall Field & Co. Highly regarded until the end, Rohlfs’ obituary was published in The New York Times .
In celebration of the project, the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation will donate an important Rohlfs work to each of the participating venues, including three chairs, a rocking chair and a large carved candlestand.
The exhibition will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art (September 20⁊anuary 3, 2010), Carnegie Museum of Art (January 30⁁pril 25, 2010), and Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (May 22⁓eptember 6, 2010) before completing its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (October 19, 2010⁊anuary 23, 2011).
The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs by Cunningham with a foreword by Barnes and an introduction by Fayen, is published by Yale University Press in association with American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation. It was named winner of the 2008 Henry Russell Hitchcock Award by the Victorian Society of America. Hardcover editions are priced at $65, softcover $50 and are available from MAM’s Museum Store, 414-224-3210 or www.mam.org/store .
Several gallery talks are scheduled at MAM: “A Closer Look” will be presented July 21 with Ethan Lasser, curator at the Chipstone Foundation; and “Charles Rohlfs and the Arts and Crafts Movement” will be presented August 11 by Mel Buchanan, Mae E. Demmer assistant curator of Twentieth Century Design.
The Milwaukee Art Museum is at 700 North Art Museum Drive. For information, 414-224-3200 or www.mam.org .
