The Crafted World of Wharton Esherick

by Amanda C. Burdan and Emily Zilber

The Brandywine Museum of Art’s new exhibition, The Crafted World of Wharton Esherick, explores the interdisciplinary creativity of Wharton Esherick (1887–1970), the famed American artist and designer renowned for his expressive approach to wood, his favored medium. Best known as the father of the Studio Furniture Movement, he elevated functional objects, crafting them with bold, experimental techniques and forms. By the end of his career, Esherick had gained international prominence for his sculptural and materially seductive art.

The exhibition is the first to feature works exclusively from the rich collection of the Wharton Esherick Museum (WEM), located in the artist’s hand-crafted home and studio built between 1926 and 1966. Much of the checklist has never before been seen outside of WEM. While not a comprehensive retrospective, The Crafted World follows the artist’s career from his early woodcut illustrations for books by the avant-garde literati to his revolutionary reimagining of furniture as organic sculpture. Works are presented in thematic installations, strategically juxtaposing artworks, objects, historic photography, and other riches from WEM’s collection of over 3,000 objects.

Rural and Urban

Esherick’s home and studio was a fundamentally rural experiment. When construction began in 1926, he worked amid a landscape of fields, forests, and the occasional farmhouse. Esherick served as the “architect” for the project, and his collaborators were local laborers who worked with the land and natural materials.

Although he maintained an identity as a “rural” artist throughout his career, Esherick’s lifestyle on the mountainside coexisted with deep ties to urbanity. Much of his artwork arose from close connections with artists and writers, actors and performers, and savvy clients in intellectual and creative circles in Philadelphia and New York City. Woodcut illustrations (figure 1) were central to the way in which Esherick navigated his existence between city and country. His geometric, high-contrast compositions depicted both rural life and moments of cosmopolitan pleasure. His desire to maintain the rural landscape around his property as the surrounding area was being built up may have led him to this site for the studio. Diamond Rock Hill, named for a large outcrop of rock studded with quartz crystals, almost became a quarry before Esherick acquired the land.

Pattern Recognition

Pattern was one of the most significant bridges between Esherick’s work in two and three dimensions. By placing his paintings in hand-carved frames with pictorial and abstract patterns, he brought new life to his two-dimensional work while flattening the assumed hierarchical relationship of the central image over its supplemental surrounding.

The primary visual interest of Esherick’s highly patterned Drop-Leaf Desk (figure 2) is the pictorial decoration applied to the façade of a functional object. The desk was used to physically support the artist’s printmaking practice, another space where he investigated how pattern might be used to tell stories. As he made more three-dimensional works in wood, both furniture and sculpture, Esherick explored new ways of thinking about repetition and ornamentation that found possibilities inherent to the material itself. Repeated forms, carefully positioned grain, subtle variation in tone, and deft material selection are just some of the ways that Esherick used pattern to communicate.

Bodies in Space

Themes of bodies, movement, and gesture appear throughout Esherick’s oeuvre in portraits, life drawings, and sketches of performers. He largely stopped depicting the human body in a literal way in the 1930s as his approach drifted toward sculptural forms and furniture. Esherick brought his deep understanding of the human body to his work in three dimensions, where he explored how abstract bodily movement can be used as the emotional and compositional foundation for nonrepresentational works of art.

Furniture is fundamentally of and about the body. People build intimate physical and emotional relationships with the furniture that shapes the practice of their daily lives. Esherick took this into consideration when he designed chairs, tables, and other objects intended for use, in spaces private and domestic or active and public. For example, his double music stand (figure 3) allowed his client Herbert Koslow—an insurance industry professional as well as a flutist and classical singer—and his wife, also a flutist, to play duets. The construction of this stand required the musicians to face one another rather than the audience, allowing them to better respond to gestural and sonic cues from their partner.

The Way Things Grow

The twisting, spiraling forms that permeate Esherick’s studio and broader output tie directly to the artist’s career-long interest in the way things grow in the natural world. Across his practice, he sought to bring the mechanisms of nature into alignment with the built environment through branching, serpentine, and asymmetric forms. He saw the upward twist, illustrated most fully in the now iconic spiral staircase at the center of his studio, as formally embodying this idea of natural growth. Esherick returned to this form in models for staircase commissions for the Bok House in Gulph Mills, PA—in which the spiral is created through gradual shifts in the shape and width of each step—and for the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, PA—with a staircase design like his studio’s that revolves around a center post (figure 4).

Esherick took inspiration from a range of ideas, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s notion of “organic” architecture and the theories of Rudolf Steiner, who understood nature as an animating force rather than something to be tamed. The environment in which Esherick lived also profoundly impacted his creative outlook, with the bulk of his output executed using the very woods that sheltered his home and studio.

After the Brandywine, the exhibition will travel to the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, OH. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, funded in part by a Dean F. Failey Grant from the Decorative Arts Trust, that approaches the artist’s work in innovative ways, with newly commissioned photography by renowned architectural photographer Joshua McHugh. Essays by curator Emily Zilber, Sarah Archer, Colin Fanning, Ann Glasscock, and Holly Gore offer fresh perspectives and innovative biographical research.

Amanda C. Burdan, PhD, is Senior Curator at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, PA. Emily Zilber is Director of Curatorial Affairs and Strategic Partnerships at the Wharton Esherick Museum in Malvern, PA.

A print version of this article was published in The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, one of our most popular member benefits. Join today!