Books June/July 2002 onetree A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940 Shaping the Modern: American Decorative Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago 1917-65 Utopia & Reality: Modernity in Sweden 1900-1960 Peter Skubic: Between Schmuck/Jewellery Contemporary Japanese Jewellery Navajo Spoons: Indian Artistry and the Souvenir Trade, 1880s-1940s The Woven Coverlets of Norway Martin Puryear Archive
	onetree by Garry Olson and Peter Toaig, 2001, Merrell Publishers, London, England, distributed by Rizzoli International Publications, New York, NY, 212-387-3622; 192 pages, foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales, photography by Robert Walker. $29.95 paperback. Reviewed by Stephen May In 1998, an ailing 170-year-old oak tree was felled at the British National Trust's Tatton Estate in Cheshire, launching an ambitious project to demonstrate the economic and cultural value of trees to modern society and to showcase the creativity of English craftsmen. Every scrap of the tree—bark, leaves, twigs and sawdust—was distributed to over 74 artists to turn into functional objects. They came up with diverse pieces-clothing, furniture, household wares, jewelry, sculpture and toys. These objects, organized by furniture designers/makers Garry Olson and Peter Toaig into a traveling exhibition (Geffrye Museum, London, June 25-September 1), are the subject of this book. Every stage of the onetree project was recorded by Robert Walker, from the felling to the objects created from the tree to the replanting of its acorns by schoolchildren. Olson and Toaig describe how once down the tree was sliced into planks at a mill, while branches and other appendages were carefully collected and their bark protected from deer. The timber was left in the mill's yard for a year and a half to reduce moisture and enhance its working qualities. Soliciting proposals, the authors received an "astonishing variety," ranging from "down-to-earth practical ideas to wildly imaginative art projects." They approved about half the applications, involving craftspeople from all over England and a few from Scotland and Wales. Among the most striking furniture are Olson's chest with drawers that float in an exposed outer frame; Neil Taylor's Welsh stick chair darkened by allowing vinegar to react to tannin in the oak, and Lorna Green's giant rocking chair made, without screws, out of branches. Using the largest single plank, as wide as the trunk, Andrew Varah created a bench with six stainless steel tube backrests, each end capped with glass discs that form an outline of the original trunk. Silversmiths Anton Pruden and Rebecca Smith used a tarnish-resistant sterling silver alloy to encircle a wood salad bowl and for spoons at the end of long-handled servers; Julienne Dolphin Wilding created a 177-piece jigsaw puzzle; and Paula McNamara sewed together thin slices of warped wood resembling potato chips into a woman's jacket. Other useful objects included Thomas Hawson's sturdy cherry-picker's ladder created out of turned logs, a swill basket by Owen Jones made of thin strips that were shaped, smoothed and woven, and Rob Cade's fetal stethoscope. Michael Leigh, an art-mail artist, fashioned pieces of veneer from the tree into postcards, asked mail artists around the world to add collage, drawings, rubber stampings, etc. to the card and mail it back, then created a colorful montage from the 57 returned cards. Even the sawdust was put to use: Mike Dodd burned it and added the ash to ceramic glazes to create smoke-brown stoneware pots; David Grimshaw combined it with resin to make a coffee table supported by a lightweight steel frame; and John Ward used it to smoke ham. This book deserves a wide readership. The ingenuity, craftsmanship and artistic talent that turned onetree into a grand celebration should encourage woodworkers, furniture makers and conservationists everywhere. Perhaps the success of the project will stimulate similar efforts on this side of the Atlantic. One hopes that, as Chris Baines, an environmental activist, concludes, "people down the generations will remember onetree for the way it helped reconnect an urban generation with the power and beauty of the natural world, just as the new millennium was dawning." Stephen May, a historian and writer, lives in Washington, DC, and Maine. TOP
	A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940 by Erica E. Hirshler, 2001, MFA Publications, a division of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York, NY, 800-338-2665; 228 pages, illustrated. $40. Reviewed by Julie Ardery Incited by the feminist movement and the nation's Bicentennial, the 1970s were the heyday of exhibitions featuring women and regional art. From these brave early shows, most of them surveys undertaken in a spirit of partisanship and breathless discovery, "A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940" takes a welcome leap forward. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston produced this exhibition late last year, and its curator Erica E. Hirshler's excellent catalog sets a new high-water mark for such shows to come. Rather than marching seven decades of Boston's most notable women artists past us, Hirshler has deftly used biographies to develop several convincing and interlocking ideas: first among them, that the late-19th-century art world of Boston was "a small, insular dominion," one in which women artists especially were related by schooling, blood and marriage. She makes the strong case that, in an age that discounted career women in the arts, these "integrated relationships . . . enabled many of them to excel." With superb and varied documentation, Hirshler shows how Boston women traveled and exhibited together, how they taught one another and wheedled commissions for friends. For example, Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904), one of the most accomplished artists here, earned the first of many assignments in stained glass, for a church in Worcester, Massachusetts, because her former classmate Helen Bigelow Merriman, a painter, was married to the minister. Hirshler also shows that while academic art began losing its authority elsewhere, in Boston "the academy retained its strength for a much longer period." This situation benefited women who, by 1890, had gained a majority in the city's art schools; in Boston, strong footing within established institutions served women artists well. The city's Society of Arts and Crafts, established in 1897, is the oldest in the nation, and Hirshler devotes nearly three chapters to discussing how this movement expanded opportunities for women artists. Its message of social betterment and "emphasis on the artistic home," she writes, "provided creative women with a socially acceptable milieu in which to produce their work." Throughout the book, Hirshler's points are driven home with splendid illustrations. Among the color plates are Josephine Hartwell Shaw's gold and pearl brooch, ca. 1913, lustrous and animated as a sea anemone, and Sarah Whitman's crisp and simple book cover for Thoreau's Cape Cod, embellished only with three stalks of grass. Not all of these artists produced work of interest, and Hirshler tactfully tells us why. Carefully examining how Boston women rallied around and then gradually could abandon a conservative aesthetic, she demonstrates that when we look at art we're seeing more than talent at work. We're seeing the shape of power, too. Julie Ardery is the author of The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art ( 1998). TOP
	Shaping the Modern: American Decorative Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago 1917-65 2001, The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, 312-443-3533; 112 pages, essays by Judith A. Barter and Jennifer M. Downs, illustrated, paperback. Subscription $20 members of the Art Institute, $25 nonmembers, $14.95 individual copy. The Art Institute's strong holdings in 20th-century decorative arts are highlighted in this issue of Museum Studies (Vol. 27, No. 2), the institute's semiannual publication, presenting some 40 objects. Among the works discussed and illustrated as illuminating the development of "the modern spirit" are ceramics by Maija Grotell, Gertrud and Otto Natzler and Toshiko Takaezu, metal works by Margret Craver and Arthur Pulos, furniture by Charles and Ray Eames and Paul T. Frankl, and glass designs by Paul Manship and Reuben Haley. TOP
	Utopia & Reality: Modernity in Sweden 1900-1960 2002, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 800-987-7323, in association with the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, NY; 328 pages, 19 contributors, illustrated. $65. The Swedish response to the impulse to be modern that characterized the 20th century is surveyed in its economic, social, political and cultural ramifications by scholars in many disciplines in this companion book to the exhibit at the Bard Graduate Center through June 16. The more than 200 works illustrated document expression in architecture, art, photography, film and design. The essay "Design for Modern People," by Cilla Robach, curator of applied arts at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, is of particular interest for its account of Swedish Modern—"a blend of the uncomplicated idiom of Functionalism with the rural folk tradition's feeling for natural materials"—the style that by mid-century had won enduring international acceptance. She traces the decades-long collaboration between those in the arts and crafts and manufacturers to produce consumer goods that were affordable but also aesthetically pleasing, fulfilling the democratic ideal that everyone is entitled to beauty in daily life. TOP
	Peter Skubic: Between Schmuck/Jewellery 2001, Arnoldsche, Stuttgart, Germany, distributed by Antique Collectors' Club, Wappingers Falls, NY, 845-297-0003; 204 pages, texts in English/German by Helen W. Drutt English, Petra Zimmermann, Florian Hufnagl, Karl Bollmann, illustrated. $75. In the 30-year career captured in this monograph, the Austrian artist Peter Skubic has relentlessly explored the limits of the jewelry medium. Trained to work in gold and silver, he has made steel his primary material in an oeuvre encompassing functional and nonfunctional jewelry, large site-specific works, drawings and at one point an outré project, "Jewellery Under the Skin," in which a steel implant was inserted under the skin of his arm and removed seven years later. Helen W. Drutt English comments on Skubic's protean talent: "His works of the 1970s express a strong affinity to sculpture, evident in the cut-rings and severely constructed brooches of 1977 with their cables and planes reminiscent of bridges and electrical structures. Later he tantalizes us with absurd combinations of found object. . . . Skubic's investigations bring us into the world of performance and conceptual art." TOP
	Contemporary Japanese Jewellery by Simon Fraser and Toyojiro Hida, 2001, Merrell Publishers, London, England, in association with the Crafts Council, London, distributed by Rizzoli International Publications, New York, NY, 212-387-3622; 128 pages, illustrated. $29.95 paperback. Although Japan has a long jewelry making tradition, artist-made jewelry is a 20th-century phenomenon. This elegant catalog of a recent touring exhibition in England presents some 200 works (mostly from the last decade) by 51 artists, accompanied by biographical statements. Curator Simon Fraser, a jeweler and educator, traces the history of personal adornment in Japan, and Toyojiro Hida, curator for the Crafts Gallery, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, offers an account of the ideas and practices behind the jewelry. The artists have affinities with their American and European counterparts, but also display a Japanese aesthetic in, for example, the choice of lacquer as a material, a preference for flat graphic patterns, the use of folding to achieve three-dimensionality. TOP
	Navajo Spoons: Indian Artistry and the Souvenir Trade, 1880s-1940s by Cindra Kline, 2001, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 800-249-7737; 120 pages, photography by Kyle A. Castle and Blair Clark. $27.50 paperback. The Navajo-made souvenir spoon, a charming byway of Indian silverwork and today a collectible, resulted from a convergence of economic, social and cultural forces in the late 19th century, according to this well-researched book by a nonacademic writer attracted to the subject after finding such a spoon. Navajo silverwork was coming of age, train travel in the West was bringing Native artisans and traders into the American marketplace and there was a national craze for commemorative silver connected to the Victorian love of flatware. Cindra Kline tells the history of the Navajo spoons, analyzes the styles and motifs—animals, birds and Indian-head profiles predominated—and traces the progression of silversmithing techniques. TOP
	The Woven Coverlets of Norway by Katherine Larson, 2001, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 206-543-4050, in association with the Nordic Heritage Museum, Seattle; 208 pages, illustrated. $70, hardcover, $40 paperback. The author, a weaver and researcher, discusses the centrality of the coverlet in Norwegian folk life, touching on textile production, spinning wheels and looms and the decorative and ceremonial role of the coverlet in the home, in this book occasioned by a touring exhibit (Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND, through July 14). She has organized the coverlets by type of weave, starting with figurative tapestries—billedvev—and ending with overshot coverlets that resemble Appalachian bed coverings. Pattern drawings and archival photographs are included, as are a glossary, bibliography and index. TOP
	Martin Puryear by Margo A. Crutchfield, 2001, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, distributed by University of Washington Press, Seattle, 206-543-4050; 70 pages, illustrated. $24.95 paperback. Majestic in scale, inventive in form and meticulously constructed, 12 works in wood created by the sculptor Martin Puryear between 1989 and 2000 are the subject of this catalog of a recent touring exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The commentary by curator Margo A. Crutchfield illuminates the artist's life, diverse influences and dedication to process.
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