Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900
Frantisek Vízner: Sklo / Glass 1951-2001
Earth Transformed: Chinese Ceramics in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The World of Rozome: Wax-Resist Textiles of Japan
Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum
Candace
Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900
by Amelia Peck and Carol Irish, 2001, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, NY, and Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 800-987-7323; 288
pages, illustrated. $45. Reviewed by Catherine Lynn.
William Morris inspired a great many artists to take craft seriously. One of them was Candace Wheeler, a housewife who nurtured her talent for painting along with raising her four children. In 1876, when she was 50 years old, she visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and there an exhibition of embroidery from London's Royal Society of Art Needlework, some of it designed by Morris, and all of it inspired by his example and teaching, triggered her real life's work. What followed is a tale that has been told often. The next year Wheeler founded in New York a charitable organization based on the London model, intended to shelter dignified work for "ladies" who had fallen on hard times, especially Civil War widows. Wheeler's Society of Decorative Art fostered skilled needlework and artistic design that aspired to create a distinctly American type of embroidery featuring American flora. The society soon had branches in several cities. Within another year Wheeler founded the nonprofit New York Exchange for Woman's Work to market more ordinary domestic handcrafts. It is still a going concern.
But she soon left the management of her charitable organizations to others, and took the most talented of her newly trained workers with her to form her first partnership in a decorating business with no less a figure than the painter Louis Comfort Tiffany. As Associated Artists, they treated rooms as works of art and were widely publicized well before Tiffany's glass brought him international renown, and Wheeler's role as director of decoration in the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 crowned her national fame.
Wheeler's activities, remarkable for a Victorian "lady," caught the attention of the New York press in the 1870s, coached by her own writings in the Art Interchange, a magazine she also helped launch. And Wheeler charmingly retold her own tale to interviewers, as well as in the articles and autobiographies she wrote well into her old, old age, when, as she put it, she found herself "in a lonesome land where no one remembered that I had ever been young, or called me by my given name." But she was still inspiring everyone whose life hers touched, though she tended to muddle her own history a bit. Unmuddling it is one of this catalog's contributions. By the time Wheeler died in 1923 at the age of 96, the generation of feminists who three years earlier won the vote for women had been reading versions of her biography since 1888, when the first known version appeared in a book called Successful Women.
To tell Wheeler's tale anew in the 80-page biography that serves as introduction to this catalog of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 10-January 6, 2002), Amelia Peck undertook meticulous original research about the life of a farm girl from Delhi, New York, who came to the city as the 16-year-old bride of a sporadically successful, but never hugely rich, businessman. This biographer has evidently been intrigued to follow the confluences of mere chance with sheer will that took that girl who loved and drew flowers, as so many other girls did, from obscurity to centrality in New York's artistic world. Just how Wheeler made the acquaintance of leading artists and literary figures, developing life-long friendships with several, including Mark Twain, has clearly fascinated Peck, who nails down the points of contact with the people who became pivotal to Wheeler's many enterprises. She also traces the ways a woman of no brilliant social standing enlisted the city's very rich and prominent matrons to support her charities. Wheeler's establishment of an artists' retreat, Onteora, in the Catskills was a part of her story I did not know, and I knew little more than the names of women artists who worked for Wheeler, and whom Peck has now sketched in biographies.
In this well-documented and well-written publication Peck and Carol Irish have given us a great deal more than a permanent record of a short-lived exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan Museum during what must surely rank as New York's grimmest autumn. While the shades of black and gray that had shrouded so much of the city in a single morning still lingered over the scenes of Wheeler's long-forgotten triumphs, a colorful array of her delicate fabrics was put on display. The curators brought many of them up from the storage to which they had been committed in 1928, when Dora Wheeler Keith donated 27 pieces of her mother's work to the museum.
The most spectacular are large panels by the Associated Artists, who embroidered and appliquéd them with an ardor to convey the essence of natural beauty. These, along with repeating patterns they designed for Cheney Brothers' textile mills in Manchester, Connecticut, are still appealing to modern tastes. Less congenial is their large "needle-woven tapestry" Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night, borrowed from the Shelburne Museum, in which Dora depicted the classically inspired scene with as much realistic delicacy of shading and texture as her team of highly skilled embroiderers could muster. But this is the piece that Wheeler herself would surely have ranked highest among her firm's work in the Met's exhibit, for it is the only known surviving example of the ambitious figural compositions that represent her campaign to endow the arts of the needle with the status of high art, freed from constraining rules of would-be "design reformers" who decreed that only abstraction was suitable for ornamenting the "lesser" applied arts.
I was disappointed not to see the show itself because Candace Wheeler has interested me since I stumbled across her name among those of pattern designers more than 30 years ago when I was researching wallpaper. So I am grateful for Peck and Irish's carefully wrought book with its clear pictures of the 97 objects I missed on display. These include works by Wheeler and her circle that were borrowed from institutions and from her family—paintings, photographs, interior decorations, pattern designs and most of all textiles—by artists and designers with whom her relationships, familial, social and professional, were as intricately entwined, the catalog's authors reveal, as the threads of her fabrics.
Catherine Lynn, a decorative arts historian, lives in New Haven.
Robert
Willson: Image-Maker
by Matthew Kangas, 2002, Pace-Willson Foundation, San Antonio, TX,
with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 206-543-4050; 172 pages,
foreword by Tina Oldknow, illustrated. $35.
When Texas-born Robert
Willson (1912-2000) arrived in Venice for the first time, in 1956, and
discovered the glass studios of Murano, he was a 44-year-old art professor
working mostly in ceramics but increasingly drawn to glass, and was on
a travel grant from the Corning Glass Works. By the early 60s, he was
collaborating with Murano artisans to produce the solid glass sculptures
that became his major oeuvre over 37 years. In this monograph, the critic
Matthew Kangas brings to life an artist who was both regional and international.
He discusses Willson's southwestern background (including Native American
influences) and education, his years in Mexico in the 1930s, where he
met the great muralists and encountered pre-Columbian art, which inspired
his imagery. "Perhaps a generation too early to be fully accepted
by the homegrown American studio glass movement, and a generation too
late to be grouped with American regional artists," Kangas writes,
"Willson has slipped through the cracks of American art history…However,
when we examine his breadth as an artist-painter, ceramist, watercolorist,
photographer and glass sculptor-combined with his parallel roles as art
professor, writer, curator, amateur graphic designer and publisher, his
contributions to American culture become undeniable." (A Willson
retrospective is at Russell Hill Rogers Gallery, Southwest School of Art
& Craft, San Antonio, November 21-January 11, 2003.)
Frantisek
Vízner: Sklo / Glass 1951-2001
by William Warmus, 2001, Barry Friedman Gallery Ltd., New York, NY,
212-794-8950; 250 pages, English and Czech, illustrated. $65.
Frantisek Vízner is known internationally for his austere, serene glass sculptures. "The restrained shapes of Vizner's vessels are achieved by a sometimes brutal, sometimes delicate array of room temperature technical processes, most of which are traditional to glassmaking but some of which would be equally at home in a quarry," writes the glass specialist William Warmus in this primarily pictorial monograph on the Czech artist. "He selects a raw block of solid glass. He rough shapes that block with grinding stones, diamond tools, drilling and boring technology. An array of fine grinding disks, glass stencils, carborundum powders and hydrofluoric acids are used to tune shapes and cleanse surfaces. The objects that result have sometimes been called 'minimalist' but I prefer to consider the techniques minimalist and the results classic." The photographs encompass, in addition to cut glass spanning 40 years, other aspects of Vízner's oeuvre-student work, industrial designs and architectural commissions. A chronology is included.
Rudy
Autio
by Louana M. Lackey, 2002, American Ceramic Society, Westerville, OH,
614-890-4700; 262 pages, foreword by Peter Voulkos, illustrated. $65.
In this biographical
account of the ceramist Rudy Autio, Louana M. Lackey, a ceramics scholar,
draws on interviews with the artist and his friends and colleagues, as
well as from the archive kept by his wife, Lela. The book touches all
bases—Finnish immigrant parents, a Montana childhood in which an
interest in art was awakened in public schools, Navy service in World
War II, education at Montana State College, Bozeman, where he formed what
would be a lifelong friendship with Peter Voulkos, their collaboration
in creating the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, and his development
as a teacher at the University of Montana, and an artist known best for
his slab-built clay vessels painted with sinuous female nudes and/or horses.
Autio's commissions, trips abroad, workshops and working methods are noted.
Missing is critical discussion. His ceramics and works on paper, 1955
- 2001, are presented in 95 color pages.
Earth
Transformed: Chinese Ceramics in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
by Wu Tung, 2001, MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA,
distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York, NY, 212-627-1999;
190 pages, illustrated.$40.
Nearly 5,000 years
of Chinese ceramics are represented by 79 masterpieces from the extensive
Asian holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in this elegantly designed
book. The introduction by Wu Tung, head of the Department of the Art of
Asia, Oceania and Africa at the museum, traces the history of the collection.
Interspersed among the entries, which focus on aesthetic experience and
cultural context, are descriptions of the major types of Chinese ceramics
and an essay on conservation. An illustrated timeline and a kiln map of
China are included, as are a glossary and bibliography. The design is
enhanced by the silk binding and moiré endpapers.
The
World of Rozome: Wax-Resist Textiles of Japan
by Betsy Sterling Benjamin, 2002, Kodansha International, New York,
NY, 917-322-6235; 223 pages, foreword by Jason Pollen, illustrated. $49.94
paperback.
In this reprint of
a 1996 book, Betsy Sterling Benjamin, an artist who has specialized in
kimono design, the history of Japanese costume and traditional resist
processes, traces the history and long tradition of wax-resist textile
making—rozome, the shortened form of roketsuzome—in
Japan and its practice today. Working with brushes, rozome artists have
developed techniques in shading, control and luminosity that set their
work apart from the batik of other countries. Sterling includes interviews
with 17 contemporary artists who discuss their lives and diverse approaches
to the craft, from application on kimonos to sculptural works. A section
on techniques has recipes and step-by-step illustrated instructions.
Art
and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum
by Arthur D. Efland, 2002, Teachers College Press, Columbia University,
New York, NY, and National Art Education Association, Reston, VA, 800-299-8321;
216 pages, illustrated. $22 ($18 NAEA members) paperback.
"While it is true that most schoolchildren are not likely to become professional artists or scholars of the arts, my purpose in examining the cognitive implications of education in the arts is to see how or whether individuals can develop their powers of thought more fully through widening their understanding of art and the ideas one encounters in the study of art," writes Arthur D. Efland, professor emeritus of art education at Ohio State University, in this combination study/polemic. He analyzes the current scholarship on the cognitive nature of learning in the visual arts and discusses its application, disputes the view that the arts are primarily emotive and argues for the value of the arts in developing cognitive ability in children. The arts can contribute to the understanding of the social and cultural landscape that each individual inhabits, he writes, "since the work of art mirrors this world through metaphoric elaboration."
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