Candelabrum
photo Gavin Ashworth, © American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation / Workshop photo collection of Winterthur Library /
Tall-Back Rocking Chair
photo Tom Little, collection of Carnegie Museum o f Art.
But his acting career was short-lived. Under-
employed and restless, in 1896 Rohlfs be-
gan building furniture for use in their home,
and within a few years had established a
professional shop.
A natural showman, Rohlfs downplayed
his experience in the stove industry and
presented himself as a cultivated man with
a genius for design. Since Oscar Wilde had
singled out cast-iron stoves for censure
in his lectures on taste, Rohlfs may have
wished to distance himself from that indus-
try-even though his own designs were in
keeping with Wilde’s aesthetic. Yet much
of Rohlfs’s furniture is intriguingly similar
to his stoves, which relied on elaborate pat-
terns and textures to enliven boxy, mono-
chrome forms. His most successful pieces,
like the
Desk Chair
, 1898-99,
Tall-Back
Rocking Chair,
ca. 1901, and
Standing Desk,
1902-4, marry form and ornament brilliant-
ly. The simplicity and clarity of the
Desk
Chair
restrains its radically asymmetrical
carved design; likewise, in the
Tall-Back
Rocking Chair
and
Standing Desk,
complex
ornamental passages are quieted by broad
expanses of undecorated wood. The visual
buzz of Rohlfs’s swirling patterns against
oak’s pronounced grain creates an intensity
and drama quite alien to the gravitas of Arts
and Crafts furniture. In pieces that strike
the right balance, the result is wonderfully
exciting. But theater critics complained of
Rohlfs’s penchant for chewing scenery, and
at times his furniture reflects the same ten-
dency. His most inventive designs have
a turbulent energy that borders on frenzy,
with wild fret-sawn profiles and thickets
of densely carved ornament.
As an industrial patternmaker, Rohlfs
had become intimately familiar with the
class divisions between craftsmen and de-
signers. He clearly knew which side of that
line he wanted to occupy and embraced the
role of auteur as an industrial designer and
as an actor. As a furniture maker, Rohlfs
was not wedded to process or craftsman-
ship. Although he was devoted to wood as
a material, what mattered most to him was
artistic originality and individual expression.
Through this shift in emphasis, Rohlfs and
a handful of his contemporaries in this and
other mediums quietly, almost inadvertent-
ly, invented a new vocation: the studio
crafts. His work and career encapsulate the
contradictory aspirations and assumptions
that still inspire and plague the field today.
Jody Clowes is a curator and writer from
Madison, in .
The exhibition is at the Dallas Museum of
Art throughjan. 3,2010, and tours to the
Carnegie Museum of Art, Jan. 30 - Apr. 25,
2010, and other venues. The hardcover
catalog is $ 65 from Yale University Press,
yale press.yale.edu.
Far Left:
Candelabrum
, 1903, eb-
onized and gold-rubbed
oak, kappa shell, copper,
17 x 1
6V*
x 7 in.
Left:
Charles Rohlfs in his
workshop with George
Thiele (far left) and
Roland Rohlfs (right),
ca. 1901-2.
Bottom:
Tall-Back Rocking Chair,
1901, oak, 5616x18
X33 in.
dec/jan 10 american craft 037
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