TEASERS AND PLEASERS AT ART MUSEUM

Rubik’s Cube captured the imagination of millions and made its namesake rich. But the craze the puzzle created was hardly the first of its kind.

More than 100 years ago, Sam Loyd invented a hand-size sliding block puzzle that was as popular in its day as Rubik’s Cube, said Sharon K. Emanuelli, curator of the world’s largest and most diverse puzzle exhibit ongoing at the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

“In fact, Loyd’s ‘14-15 Puzzle’ probably inspired Rubik,” Emanuelli said recently, “and created a phenomenon that hit the newspapers just like Rubik’s Cube. It was an unsolvable puzzle that had everyone trying to solve it. There were stories of a man found pushing pieces of pie around on his plate, and a priest found standing under a lamppost at midnight, puzzle in hand.”

About 100 variations of Rubik’s Cube are included in “Puzzles Old and New: Head Crackers, Patience Provers, and Other Tactile Teasers” on view to Feb. 22. In all, about 800 puzzles dating from the 18th Century to the present and drawn from private collections worldwide make up the show. From a pea-size interlocking burr puzzle to a coffee table-size tangram, teasers in between include Chinese ivory puzzles, a metal “Puzzle Pup” (the object is to remove a collar smaller than the dog’s head) and a secret-opening heart box you’d have to “break” to open and “mend” to close.

The exhibit is arranged according to problems posed by the puzzles, all of them mechanical, or those solved by manipulation of from one to several hundred parts. Among them are put-together, disentanglement, dexterity and impossible-object puzzles. About 80%of the exhibit came from the 10,000-piece collection of local Hughes engineer Jerry Slocum, who owns the largest cache of mechanical puzzles in the country.

Emanuelli, who has a master’s degree in sculpture, said she wanted to curate the show because she’d “always been intrigued that there are visual, mechanical and creative elements in mathematics and the sciences that correlate to the same kind of creative elements used in visual arts.

“Einstein said people don’t realize that the problems we solve in the universe are so like these little puzzles, and Piet Hein, a Danish poet and inventor, said, ‘These puzzles are a perfect model for the creative process.’ I’d agree.

“Also, the objects are endowed with elements of the three fields in which the museum is interested: folk art, modern crafts and design. In fact the three overlap:We have puzzles which are traditional folk art toys or objects of curiosity decorated in a traditional fashion, and we have contemporary craft puzzles made by hand by people inventing new ideas and objects for mass production.

“Two levels are operating aesthetically in the exhibit,” explained Emanuelli, sporting a dress with colorful squares and an easy smile. “One is the decorative aspect of the objects, their carvings, their materials or their designs. And there’s the cultural history side of that, showing how cultural values and taste are exemplified. Then there’s the design aspect itself--the ideas the designers used are very creative and important to what came after them in puzzles.”

Emanuelli, who last May became exhibitions curator at the Hudson River Museum in New York, began curating “Puzzles” about four years ago. Working for the last two years from her New York home office, she was helped by Slocum, local anthropology expert Benjamin Kilborne and other consultants from around the world.

The team designed the exhibit, using graphics and texts to illustrate the evolution of puzzles and their place in social history, as well as their aesthetic value.

“There was a huge proliferation of puzzles with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,” Emanuelli said. “My speculation is that while many were made for advertising use, there was also a whole mechanization of the world and man’s needs became problems to solve, just like the puzzles.”

But hands-on interaction was also the organizers’ aim. Nine larger puzzles on display, a life-size interlocking terrier among them, are meant to be tinkered with by museum visitors.

“Some people just mess around and walk off, leaving the puzzles in a tangle,” Emanuelli said. “Others stay and work them through until they’re done.”

And if someone can’t solve a particular puzzle?

“Well, we do have some gallery aides around who can do some of them,” she said unsympathetically. “They might help.”