The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs

Arts and Crafts Maverick

The furniture designs of Charles Rohlfs are highlighted in a major traveling exhibition

The first major exhibition on one of the most creative and enigmatic figures of the American Arts and Crafts movement comes to Southern California this summer. "The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs" opens at The Huntington on May 22 and continues through Sept. 6 in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery. The exhibition premiered at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2009 and has traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. It will complete its national tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this fall.

Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936) stands among the leaders of the nation's first foray into modernist design, along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Gustav Stickley. However, the multiplicity of his sources —which include influences from British Arts and Crafts, French Art Nouveau, and East Asian furniture, among other design traditions—makes the work difficult to categorize and has kept Rohlfs on the periphery of scholarship that has focused on more easily defined turn-of-the-century styles.

The exhibition surveys his extraordinary furniture and decorative objects through 44 examples, including pieces made by the artist for his own home as well as major commissioned works. Bringing together masterpieces culled from the collections of 10 museums and several private collections, the exhibition and accompanying book reflect new scholarship based on the Rohlfs family archives and recently discovered primary source material.

"It is an extraordinary privilege to present this exhibition here," said John Murdoch, Hannah and Russel Kully Director of Art Collections at The Huntington. "Rohlfs' sculpturally imaginative sense of design differentiates him from most other British and American artist-craftsmen working at the turn of the century, and places him in a class of his own. I hope visitors are as astonished and delighted with his work as we are."

The exhibition is a natural fit at The Huntington, as progressive design of the late 19th and early 20th century is a growing strength of the institution's holdings, anchored by a major collection of William Morris materials acquired in 1999. Since then, many significant works by both British and American designers have been added to the collection. In fact, a highlight of "The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs" is an extraordinary oak rocking chair that is a promised gift to The Huntington. Once the exhibition tour is completed, the chair will join a massive ebonized oak library table by the artist in a permanent installation devoted to early 20th-century design within the newly expanded Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.