This New Art Exhibit Shows Us That a Chair Isn’t Always Just a Chair
The Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford just unveiled a retrospective of the late Philly-area artist Wharton Esherick.
/ Photograph by Eoin O’Neill, courtesy of the Wharton Esherick Museum
If your knowledge of outside-the-box furniture design starts and ends with Ikea’s iconic and ubiquitous Poäng armchair — I’m literally sitting in one as I write this — I need to introduce you to Wharton Esherick, the 20th-century Philadelphia artist whose career is the subject of a new retrospective at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford.
“The Crafted World of Wharton Esherick,” which runs October 13th through January 19th before continuing on to museums elsewhere in the country, examines the long career of Esherick, who spent his entire life in the Philadelphia area. He’s hailed as the father of the Studio Furniture Movement, known for one-of-a-kind pieces that might take an artist months or years to build — the opposite of hyper-efficient mass production.
Esherick didn’t actually begin his artistic life as a furniture craftsman. He wanted to be a painter, and he immersed himself in those studies during the opening decade of the 1900s at both the predecessor to the University of the Arts (RIP) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, from which he dropped out in 1910. He began working with wood to build distinctive frames for his paintings. But he just couldn’t find his footing in the crowded painting world of the early 20th century, so when a friend — who happened to be the famed novelist Sherwood Anderson — told him his frames were much more interesting to look at than the paintings, he turned his eye to making furniture.
In the early days of his career, Esherick used the wooden furniture he made as a medium for artistic engravings. But he soon did away with the engravings and focused solely on creating furniture that was at times elegant and at times eccentric. He approached his chairs, tables, and desks more as art and less as things that somebody was going to sit on or at, and he emphasized to those interested in buying his works that they were, indeed, sculptures. (Want an Esherick coffee table today? Prepare to pay six figures.)
Esherick did most of his work inside his home and studio in Malvern, which he constructed himself using wood and stone from the land where they are located. That property is considered by many critics to be his finest work of art, and after he died in 1970, his family turned it into a museum that’s been largely untouched since the day he passed. The home and studio, which Esherick himself referred to as “an autobiography in three dimensions,” remain open for tours. Some of his work is also part of the permanent collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Met, and the Whitney.
As for the exhibit at the Brandywine, furniture and other objects from throughout Esherick’s career are on view, showing his evolution as an artist over the decades. Many of the pieces have never been displayed outside of the Malvern museum. And as you view Esherick’s life work, you get the feeling that the man truly enjoyed what he was doing. Indeed, a New York Times critic wrote in 1944 that “one senses that Esherick sculpts for the sheer love of it and finds joy and humor in his work.” As Esherick himself put it, “If it isn’t fun, it isn’t worth doing.”
Published as “Haute Seat” in the October 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
