AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, American furniture in the Arts and Crafts style was dismissed as a fad by critics. They were wrong, and the robust modernist chairs and tables, pioneered in America by Gustav Stickley, dominated dens and dining rooms across the land into the 1920's. Fast-forward to the present: After a 25-year-long revival, Arts and Crafts has become the style of the 90's. The squarish, dark oak furniture, popularly known as mission, is widely exhibited in museums and galleries and is collected by Hollywood trend setters like Barbra Streisand, Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg and Penny Marshall. Several films have showcased the furniture, including "The Prince of Tides" (1991), "A River Runs Through It" (1992) and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" (1992). Galleries today focus less on Stickley, whose innovative furniture is increasingly rare and costly, and more on his competitors, whose works are more plentiful and less costly. "Kindred Styles: The Arts and Crafts Furniture of Charles P. Limbert," an exhibition at Gallery 532, on Wooster Street in SoHo, through Nov. 19, sheds new light on one rival who is unknown today to all but scholars and the most dedicated enthusiasts of the style.
Collectors and dealers lent 85 of the 107 pieces on view, and they are not for sale. Prices for the rest of the objects range from $1,600 for a coat rack to $16,000 for a square table. The show was organized by Robert De Falco, the owner of the gallery, and A. Patricia Bartinique, the guest curator who wrote the catalogue; she is a professor of English at Essex County College in Newark. The gallery's displays reveal the great variety in Limbert's furniture. He borrowed freely from innovative American and European architects and designers, liberally mixing motifs and forms from the Arts and Crafts and Prairie styles. He used the same slender spindles in chair backs that Frank Lloyd Wright had introduced earlier, and his Morris chairs, with adjustable backs and slatted construction, resemble those of Stickley. The square cutouts on Limbert's chairs and tables and the inlaid metal flowers on his cabinets recall details in the furniture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh of Glasgow. And the cutout hearts reveal a familiarity with the designs of Charles Voysey of London.
Charles Limbert was born in 1854 in Lyonville, Pa., and grew up in Akron, Ohio. His father was a furniture salesman, and the son began the same way, selling chairs and tables. By 1891, Limbert and Philip J. Klingman were making furniture in Grand Rapids, Mich. The show's earliest piece, a Victorian ladder-back rocker with curvy legs, bears a label from that partnership, the Klingman & Limbert Chair Company, which was dissolved in 1892. Two years later, the Charles P. Limbert Company came into being, and two years after that it began producing Arts and Crafts furnishings. It did so until Limbert's death in 1923. His most distinctive designs are the tables and chairs with square cutouts. A plant stand of this design, appeared in "The Arts and Crafts Movement in America 1876-1916," a 1973 exhibition at the Art Museum of Princeton University, the landmark show that defined the style and helped spur its revival. The show's organizer, Robert Judson Clark, a professor in the art and archeology department at Princeton, said Limbert's slat-back chairs and standard crafts pieces were usually "underscaled and malproportioned."
But every once in a while, he said, Limbert produced an exceptional group of pieces. While there is nothing to equal the plant stand at the SoHo gallery, the chairs and tables with square cutouts are arresting. Of these, the boldest is a futuristic chair with an adjustable back and three square cutouts under the arms. It is an American version of a Morris chair, named after William Morris, a British founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, and costs $12,000. Mr. De Falco said the prices for Limbert's Morris chairs were almost as high as those made by Stickley, which cost as much as $16,000. "Limbert's Morris chair is among his most popular designs," he said. "It's called a Flash Gordon chair because the design was decades ahead of its time. MR. DE FALCO BOUGHT HIS first piece of Arts and Crafts furniture, a Stickley sideboard, in 1976. At the time, he was selling Victoriana on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn and had no idea who Stickley was. He paid $600 for the sideboard and resold it a week later for $1,100.
Today, he says, the sideboard would sell for $6,500. He had bought the sideboard at the Manhattan gallery of Lillian Nassau, the pre-eminent dealer in Tiffany and 20th-century decorative arts who died two weeks ago. She led him to her basement, and showed him the sideboard. "She said, 'Robert, you must buy it -- this is the future,' " Mr. De Falco recalls. "She was absolutely right. Where Arts and Crafts is concerned, it's still the future." And now there's Limbert too. Photos: Oak pieces by Charles P. Limbert include, from left, a windowbench, an oval table and a Morris chair--Every once in a while, says the organizer of a new show, Limbert produced an exceptional group of pieces.; One of Limbert's oak spindle chairs. (Photographs by Don Flood/Gallery 532)Building the 4-Hour Outdoor Morris Chair This DVD shows you how you can build a simple, stylish alternative to the classic Adirondack chair in four hours or less and with affordable materials you can get for $80 and less.
Building the 4-Hour Outdoor Morris Chair, part of Popular Magazine’s Easy-to-Build Furniture Series, includes step-by-step instructions for building a comfortable and sturdy outdoor Morris chair, which also features a back you can adjust. As an Easy-to-Build project, construction of this chair requires only basic tools, screws for assembly, and pre-sized wood you can pick up at your favorite local hardware store. Among the tools required for construction for this chair and whose uses are explained in detail this DVD are: Create a superb outdoor chair for less money and less time than you can imagine. This item qualifies for free standard shipping on U.S. orders over $25 Click on image to zoom Excellent vid Review by Brian I loved the detail of this video. I can't wait until I get a chance to build a couple. Great Chair - fun to build not fun to paint Review by Gene I am a beginner - made two chairs. Took considerably longer than 4-hours but it is a great project and both look great.