Studio Furniture of the Renwick Gallery: Smithsonian American Art Museum by Oscar P. Fitzgerald and Paul Greenhalgh

"Fitzgerald offers a long-overdue portfolio showcasing the Renwick Gallery's entire 84-piece collection of crafted American furniture. This critical resource will serve as a foundation for the study and historic preservation of 20th-century American furniture makers' work. Highly recommended." --"Choice" Fitzgerald’s statistical analysis of the collection, formulated from detailed interviews with the surviving artists, casts new light on workshop practices,marketing concerns and other aspects of the contemporary studio furniture movement. A foreword by noted scholar and curator Paul Greenhalgh gives readers a brilliant overview of the studio furniture field and the intimate role furniture plays in daily life. - The Crafts Report Art, architecture, and design meet function in this stunning book. Studio Furniture documents and celebrates the masters of the craft while offering a historical retrospective of American furniture practice. A terrific resource for the collector, student or layperson. - Scout and Morgan Books for Midwest Booksellers Association In this beautiful, wide-format soft cover, Oscar Fitzgerald does an admirable job of describing each maker’s importance to the movementFine Woodworking No student, collector, or furniture enthusiast should be without this coffee-table style book, available in hard or soft-cover that so beautifully illustrates such an important movement in modern craft. -Vic Tesolin, Canadian Woodworking In all, this is a can't miss text for any collector of American studio furniture. - American Style If you read this book one hundred years from now, i'm sure it would be as thought provoking as it is today. These are 84 great pieces, and this is one great book. - Canadian Woodworking & Home Improvement

Reader Reviews
All 84 furniture pieces of the Gallery a part of the Smithsonian are pictured in full-page color photographs on righthand pages with comments on them and their makers on facing lefthand pages. One sees immediately on looking through the many pieces what Greenhalgh means when he writes in the Foreword, "Furniture is perhaps more allied to architecture than any of the other individual craft-based arts." This is especially true of this studio furniture made between the early years of the 1900s to the early years of the twenty-first century. While the furniture is self-evidently modern, made basically of wood, never loosing sight of its utilitarian purpose, and its inner details (rather than flourishes, for example), it for the most part it is for the most part within the mainstream of furniture, particularly Victorian furniture and more recently art nouveau and the arts-and-crafts furniture toward the end of the Victorian era. Where the Renwick Gallery pieces depart somewhat from the mainstream it is not in shape simply for the sake of shape nor in riotous colors or assemblage calling into question the meaning of "furniture". Where this furniture departs, it is mostly in whimsical touches. Looking over the collection, one also sees what Greenhalgh means when he comments this furniture comes from a "furniture world [that] was, on the whole, less cohesive and dramatic than these other genres [e. g., jewelry] and unfolded in a more subtle and complex way." No movement, school, or "intellectual thrust" in American furniture making during this period of roughly a century meant that there was "rather, a number of seams of activity." While basically falling within the mainstream, each piece is nonetheless distinctive in appearance. The many chairs--the collection's largest category of furniture--are each distinctive for length of back, size of seat, shape of arms, and details in these. The chairs are distinctive mainly for their sense of proportion among these variables. Except for a few, they're not meant to be ostentatious, nor call attention to their maker. The impression they give off is that of being well-made; and if they give of any kind of statement, it is that of the nearness of the world of nature and the subtle and to some extent mutable connections between it and the human world.

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