Posted by: Anatole Burkin

The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs by Joseph Cunningham
Yale University Press, 2008.
$65; 304 pp.
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Charles Rohlfs remains a lesser-known furniture designer from the Arts and Craft period, but his work is now fully cataloged in a new book and works by him will be on display in a traveling exhibition during mid-2009 to 2010.

“The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs,” by Joseph Cunningham, provides an in-depth look at the man who thumbed his nose at the tenets of Arts and Craft furniture as espoused by William Morris. While most of his contemporaries limited or avoided altogether any ornamentation on their work, and strived to build “honest” furniture with beefy, obvious joinery, Rohlfs was busy carving sinuous patterns on his pieces, mostly made of quartersawn white oak and frequently joined with screws covered up by plugs made to resemble pins.

Rohlfs’ work evokes many styles, from Victorian to Art Nouveau. His best pieces remind me of the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and designs by the Greene brothers.

A native of Brooklyn, Rohlfs studied engineering, eventually ending up working for a stove factory in Buffalo, N.Y. He also tried his hand at acting, but the reviews were harsh. One critic described Rohlfs’ role in a tragedy as “screamingly funny instead of sad.”

He began dabbling in furniture making as a hobby in the late 1800s, then was encouraged to do more by friends who wanted to buy his work. With the support of a successful wife, mystery novelist Anna Katharine Green, a new career was born.

Rohlfs did not drink the Arts and Crafts movement’s Kool-Aid and in fact mocked their ideology, in particular the Roycrofters (run by Elbert Hubbard in nearby East Aurora, N.Y.). In 1902, Rohlfs described his own shop as a place where “no profit sharing is practiced and none of us wear long hair.”

A well-researched, scholarly work, the book features a generous collection of weird, wacky, and wonderful pieces designed by a man who had his own unique vision and interpretation of Arts and Crafts.