We wanted to share this wonderful article about Charles Rohlfs in today’s New York Times.
Charles Rohlfs’s Theatrical Furniture to Go on the Road
For a few years around 1900 journalists made pilgrimages to a barely marked furniture workshop in an attic over a bicycle factory in Buffalo. The workshop’s owner, a charismatic former actor named Charles Rohlfs (1853-1936), feigned some modesty in his dusty garret. But then he convinced the visiting reporters that his “artistic furniture” had no precedents or peers, only imitators.
The writers gushed over his square-framed oak pieces with sinuous carvings. “Never have art and utility been joined more skillfully than in these chairs and tables and desks,” wrote one in The Buffalo Daily Courier. The German magazine Dekorative Kunst described Mr. Rohlfs as “inventive and uninfluenced,” and Furniture Journal declared him a main inspiration for the far more famous and prolific designer Gustav Stickley.
“Rohlfs was a truly great self-promoter,” said Joseph Cunningham, the author of “The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs” (due in October from Yale University Press) and the lead curator of a Rohlfs retrospective that begins a three-year tour next June at the Milwaukee Art Museum (with stops at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Dallas, Pittsburgh and San Marino, Calif.). Mr. Cunningham, the curator of the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation in Manhattan, which promotes scholarly research and owns some Rohlfs objects, has spent three years analyzing Rohlfs’s biography. Despite woodworking skills and charm, he stayed in business for less than a decade, producing perhaps a few hundred pieces.
To read the rest, it’s on page E23 for those of you in the New York area, and or you can read it online at Charles Rohlfs, Furniture Artisan, to Have a Touring Retrospective – NYTimes.com
For more information about Rohlfs’ work be sure to register to hear Dr. Cunningham speak at the Amy Stahl Memorial Lecture on November 8.
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1 response so far ↓
Fascinating topic!