Wendell Castle

During the last year, the evolution of the American studio furniture movement from the end of World War II to the present has been described through three major museum exhibitions. The first, a retrospective for George Nakashima of New Hope at the American Craft Museum in New York and the James A. Michener Arts Center in Doylestown, typified the first generation of studio woodworkers. These men (for furniture-making then was still an exclusively male province) revered wood as a material and confined themselves to traditional furniture forms and joinery.

Sculptor-painter-furniture maker - the words bring to mind a childhood jingle, and sound like an array of job choices, not a one-man description. But Wendell Castle is all of those things, and he is all of them at once, blended, with no distinctions between the art forms. At the moment, he's bent over a wooden, vaguely rocket-shaped form in his studio, dappling the surface with a sharp chisel. When he's finished, the piece will nominally be a grandfather clock, but - under a skin of crackly and colorful paint and with a shape that will suggest a palm tree seen through an LSD haze - the fact that it is a clock will hardly be its major characteristic.

It's not a pairing that automatically comes to mind - the prints of Picasso and the furniture of Wendell Castle - but the cofounder of cubism and the art-furniture patriarch look as if they were made for each other in Wexler Gallery's current exhibition, "The Abstract Forms of Pablo Picasso and Wendell Castle. " Picasso's curved and voluptuous lines on paper echo in Castle's three-dimensional forms, and vice versa. That the 13 Picasso works are predominantly black- or brown-on-white and the six Castles are monochromatic emphasizes the relationships between forms.

Experimental woodworking, one of the least appreciated craft specialties, is belatedly - and grandly - coming into its own. A key figure in this revival, Wendell Castle, is the focus of two exhibits within easy driving distance. One is at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, the first East Coast stop on a national tour of his work. The other is a show of Castle and some of his former students in Greenville, Del. This lively and flamboyant craftsman is credited with giving furniture- making status as an art medium.

Looking for the perfect present for the holidays? Something unique, unusual, uncommon? You can get anything from a handmade hat to an Adirondack guide-boat at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's annual craft show, which opened yesterday and continues through Sunday at the Convention Center. Now in its 24th year, the show features exhibitors selected by experts in the field, including eminent furniture maker and sculptor Wendell Castle from Upstate New York, gallery directors from Washington and Los Angeles, and curators from the American Craft Museum in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Out of 1,450 craft artists from 30 states, the panel of jurors selected 195 who will present thousands of items for sale in categories including basketry, ceramics, decorative and wearable fiber, furniture, glass and jewelry.

If you imagine this Wilmington gallery site as a house - in particular, Wendell Castle's and Nancy Jurs' house in upstate New York near Rochester - you are on to something. That's because their current two-person show at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts marks the first time that this couple - a furniture designer and a ceramic artist - have ever exhibited their work outside their own home, where they have a private art gallery. This is a spirited show, a class act among recent gallery exhibits.

Starting out in an era of chain saws and power tools, American woodworker Wendell Castle realized that most furniture makers - for all their romantic traditionalism that favored such tools as adzes and drawknives - were aesthetically swayed by ideals developed for industrial production. This Kansas native, now settled in Upstate New York, was determined to give imagination its due. No wonder the only 20th-century woodworker Castle cottoned to was that benevolent humanist from Philadelphia, Wharton Esherick, whom he credits with teaching him that the making of furniture could be a form of sculpture.

Susie Brandt, whose adventurous, pop culture-inspired textile pieces make up her mini-retrospective "Rummage," at the Design Center at Philadelphia University, has to be one of Baltimore's most fabulous 20th-century exports since John Waters. Brandt and the filmmaker share similar sensibilities: She creates her quilts of found fabrics with an affection for, and humorous view of, the periods she evokes, which cover the late '50s through the early '80s. Her work is as subversive as any textile art I've ever seen, but playfully so. And she celebrates those lowbrow artifacts that the rest of us would rather sweep under the carpet.

On any calendar, John Sollo and David Rago's fall sale of 20th-century arts and furnishings in Lambertville, N.J., is a date worth jotting down for collectors of the contemporary. But the Modern Weekend set for Oct. 21 and 22 adds an incentive for local buyers that turns worthwhile into obligatory: Among the 1,500 lots are more than 20 of furniture, artwork, sketches and photographs by Wharton Esherick. According to the catalog notes, the Esherick property comes from York Fisher Jr., whose family bonded with Esherick in the late 1920s after Helene Fischer, York's grandmother and one of Esherick's great patrons, introduced him to fellow artist Hannah Weil.

Collectors with an eye for style can experience works from classic to experimental this weekend at the 16th annual Philadelphia Invitational Furniture Show. Pieces by Philadelphia's Bill Russell and Peter Handler, Maine's Thomas Moser, and the studio furniture team of Michael Bell and Susan Zelouf from Ireland will be featured. The invitational, the longest-running show devoted to furniture and furnishings in the country, will be held at the Navy Yard's Cruise Ship Terminal. "What we're really selling here is a whole experience," says organizer Josh Markel, a designer and furniture maker.

It's not a pairing that automatically comes to mind - the prints of Picasso and the furniture of Wendell Castle - but the cofounder of cubism and the art-furniture patriarch look as if they were made for each other in Wexler Gallery's current exhibition, "The Abstract Forms of Pablo Picasso and Wendell Castle. " Picasso's curved and voluptuous lines on paper echo in Castle's three-dimensional forms, and vice versa. That the 13 Picasso works are predominantly black- or brown-on-white and the six Castles are monochromatic emphasizes the relationships between forms.

Wharton Esherick, who died in 1970 two months shy of his 83d birthday, was one of the Philadelphia region's most innovative and influential artists, yet his work hasn't received as much public attention locally as his legacy warrants. Esherick began his career as a painter and printmaker - his last significant solo exhibition appears to have been one of prints at Chestnut Hill's Woodmere Art Museum in 1984 - but he's remembered primarily for his striking modernist furniture and his transformative architectural interiors.

Collectors with an eye for style can experience works from classic to experimental this weekend at the 16th annual Philadelphia Invitational Furniture Show. Pieces by Philadelphia's Bill Russell and Peter Handler, Maine's Thomas Moser, and the studio furniture team of Michael Bell and Susan Zelouf from Ireland will be featured. The invitational, the longest-running show devoted to furniture and furnishings in the country, will be held at the Navy Yard's Cruise Ship Terminal. "What we're really selling here is a whole experience," says organizer Josh Markel, a designer and furniture maker.

Susie Brandt, whose adventurous, pop culture-inspired textile pieces make up her mini-retrospective "Rummage," at the Design Center at Philadelphia University, has to be one of Baltimore's most fabulous 20th-century exports since John Waters. Brandt and the filmmaker share similar sensibilities: She creates her quilts of found fabrics with an affection for, and humorous view of, the periods she evokes, which cover the late '50s through the early '80s. Her work is as subversive as any textile art I've ever seen, but playfully so. And she celebrates those lowbrow artifacts that the rest of us would rather sweep under the carpet.

On any calendar, John Sollo and David Rago's fall sale of 20th-century arts and furnishings in Lambertville, N.J., is a date worth jotting down for collectors of the contemporary. But the Modern Weekend set for Oct. 21 and 22 adds an incentive for local buyers that turns worthwhile into obligatory: Among the 1,500 lots are more than 20 of furniture, artwork, sketches and photographs by Wharton Esherick. According to the catalog notes, the Esherick property comes from York Fisher Jr., whose family bonded with Esherick in the late 1920s after Helene Fischer, York's grandmother and one of Esherick's great patrons, introduced him to fellow artist Hannah Weil.

Looking for the perfect present for the holidays? Something unique, unusual, uncommon? You can get anything from a handmade hat to an Adirondack guide-boat at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's annual craft show, which opened yesterday and continues through Sunday at the Convention Center. Now in its 24th year, the show features exhibitors selected by experts in the field, including eminent furniture maker and sculptor Wendell Castle from Upstate New York, gallery directors from Washington and Los Angeles, and curators from the American Craft Museum in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Out of 1,450 craft artists from 30 states, the panel of jurors selected 195 who will present thousands of items for sale in categories including basketry, ceramics, decorative and wearable fiber, furniture, glass and jewelry.

If you imagine this Wilmington gallery site as a house - in particular, Wendell Castle's and Nancy Jurs' house in upstate New York near Rochester - you are on to something. That's because their current two-person show at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts marks the first time that this couple - a furniture designer and a ceramic artist - have ever exhibited their work outside their own home, where they have a private art gallery. This is a spirited show, a class act among recent gallery exhibits.

Sculptor-painter-furniture maker - the words bring to mind a childhood jingle, and sound like an array of job choices, not a one-man description. But Wendell Castle is all of those things, and he is all of them at once, blended, with no distinctions between the art forms. At the moment, he's bent over a wooden, vaguely rocket-shaped form in his studio, dappling the surface with a sharp chisel. When he's finished, the piece will nominally be a grandfather clock, but - under a skin of crackly and colorful paint and with a shape that will suggest a palm tree seen through an LSD haze - the fact that it is a clock will hardly be its major characteristic.

Experimental woodworking, one of the least appreciated craft specialties, is belatedly - and grandly - coming into its own. A key figure in this revival, Wendell Castle, is the focus of two exhibits within easy driving distance. One is at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, the first East Coast stop on a national tour of his work. The other is a show of Castle and some of his former students in Greenville, Del. This lively and flamboyant craftsman is credited with giving furniture- making status as an art medium.

During the last year, the evolution of the American studio furniture movement from the end of World War II to the present has been described through three major museum exhibitions. The first, a retrospective for George Nakashima of New Hope at the American Craft Museum in New York and the James A. Michener Arts Center in Doylestown, typified the first generation of studio woodworkers. These men (for furniture-making then was still an exclusively male province) revered wood as a material and confined themselves to traditional furniture forms and joinery.