Stickley furniture collectors and shoppers may know the name Gustav Stickley (1858-1942) but aren’t aware of his life story. This accessible and informative profile of Stickley recounts how he dropped out of school at age 12 after his father abandoned the family in Wisconsin, forcing his mother to move her brood to Pennsylvania where her brother owned a furniture factory. It is here that young Gustav began his journey as a furniture seller, designer, and manufacturer.
In 1883, Stickley married and moved to Syracuse, NY where he formed a company that made period reproductions. The company eventually evolved into a manufacturer of original Stickley furniture marked by its trademark simplistic style and quality craftsmanship.
The program relies on voice-over narration, readings, pleasing background music, sepia-tone photographs, vintage footage, drawings, maps, and quality interviews with Stickley family members, biographers, historians, museum curators, and furniture collectors to trace the rise and fall of the company that moved executive headquarters to Manhattan in 1906. It is here that Stickley opened a 12-story department store featuring well-designed furniture and other household accessories and furnishings. The top floor was devoted to a farm-to-table restaurant with produce furnished by the sprawling family farm in New Jersey that has been preserved as the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms.
The onset of WWI and a softening furniture market forced the corporation into bankruptcy in 1915. Stickley worked with other business partners but never achieved the same success. Eventually, as a widower, he moved to his daughter’s home in Syracuse where he toiled alone trying to develop new furniture finishes. He died “isolated and forgotten by industry colleagues.”
A revival of interest in the arts and crafts movement spurred recognition of Stickley furniture in the 1970s and 1980s with movie clips from the era showing how trendy the furniture had become. Production values are good, and the coverage is fascinating, making this a winner for viewers interested in the arts and crafts movement and the evolution of Stickley furniture. Recommended. Aud: P.
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What is the Arts and Crafts Movement?
The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most industrialized country in the world at that time. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society. Arts and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed.
The Arts and Crafts movement did not promote a particular style, but it did advocate reform as part of its philosophy and instigated a critique of industrial labor; as modern machines replaced workers, Arts and Crafts proponents called for an end to the division of labor and advanced the designer as a craftsman.
The American Arts and Crafts movement was inextricably linked to the British movement and closely aligned with the work of William Morris (1834–1896), who believed that industrialization alienated labor and created a dehumanizing distance between the designer and manufacturer. Morris strove to unite all the arts within the decoration of the home, emphasizing nature and simplicity of form.
Diversity persevered within the American Arts and Crafts movement as a mixture of individuals worked in diverse locations. Gustav Stickley (1858–1942), a founder of The United Crafts (later known as the Craftsman Workshops), was a proselytizer of the craftsman ideal. Emulating William Morris’s production through guild manufacture of his furniture, Stickley believed that mass-produced furniture was poorly constructed and overly complicated in design. Stickley set out to improve American taste through “craftsman” or “mission” furniture with designs governed by honest construction, simple lines, and quality material. He also published the highly influential The Craftsman (1901–16), a beacon for the American Arts and Crafts movement.
The rise of urban centers and the inevitability of technology presaged the end of the Arts and Crafts movement...By the 1920s, machine-age modernity and the pursuit of a national identity had captured the attention of designers and consumers, bringing an end to the handcrafted nature of the Arts and Crafts movement in America.
- From Monica Obniski's wonderful essay, The Arts and Crafts Movement in America