ART REVIEW : A Feast of Craftsmanship : Furniture: Works by Pasadena architects Charles and Henry Greene are in a permanent installation at the Huntington Gallery’s American building.

While Los Angeles’ performing arts culturati still focus on the L.A. Festival, the fine-arts crowd is enthusiastically sure that by month’s end they will remember September less for the festival’s multicultural kaleidoscope and more as the moment when the town officially marked the revival of the American Arts and Crafts movement. It was the epic turn-of-the-century amalgam of medieval rustication and Oriental refinement that set the stage for modernism and the belief that art could embody socialist values of plain living and high thinking.

This apotheosis begins today in San Marino, where the Huntington Gallery’s American building is opening a permanent installation of fabled furniture designed by Pasadena architects Charles and Henry Greene. Ensconced in the Dorothy Collins Brown wing of the Scott Building, it consists of a lovingly detailed dining room, staircase and a gallery of prime furniture, proving the brothers’ important, distinctive and sometimes eccentric contribution to Los Angeles and the movement.

The larger American and European A&C; stage will open up Sept. 23 with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s, “The American Arts and Crafts Movement: The Palevsky Collection” (to Jan. 26). It will trot out 250 objects from one of the most all-embracing of American collections, supported by foreign examples and illuminated by a scholarly symposium.

Why all the fuss?

For one thing A&C; has become a collectors craze. People who started buying craftsman objects a few years ago out of spontaneous attraction find they could not afford their Stickley table or Tiffany treasure today. Celebrities have gotten into the act, as when Barbra Streisand bid $300,000 for a craftsman sideboard at auction. All that, however, is just one more manifestation of the endless current impulse to turn everything into a commodity.

More significant, the revival marks a longing for values attached to the craftsman tradition. It started in Britain in the late 19th Century as a loving-hands-at-home rebellion against Victorian kitsch and the stultifying conformity dictated by the Industrial Revolution. The fact that it’s back suggests a revivalist recoil from the cool anonymity of the Computer Age by a now-affluent generation newly nostalgic for the homespun idealism of Woodstock.

Still, there may be citizens here who think they don’t know from arts and crafts while in fact dwelling in the middle of it and buying their beadwork supplies at Aaron Brothers. Anybody who knows the myriad cozy old bungalows that still dot the local landscape knows the craftsman tradition in the same way Moliere’s bourgeois gentleman knew prose--without knowing he knew it.

The movement left us much of the vernacular domestic architecture we sigh for when thinking of a sweeter, older L.A. swinging on grandfather’s front porch on summer nights, sipping iced tea and inhaling jasmine.

The Huntington installation shows that our modest craftsman dwellings had an aristocratic parentage in the Greenes’ work in Pasadena. Their practice peaked from around 1902 until World War I as they developed their individualistic “arroyo” style. The Huntington installation is a collaborative venture between itself and the Greenes’ famous Gamble House, which is owned by USC and overseen by curator Randell Mackinson.

Greene-watcher James Marston Fitch once characterized their clients as “usually wealthy Midwesterners of liberal Protestant or Quaker background. They belonged to that segment of opinion which supported national parks, woman’s suffrage, progressive education, factory reform. They were involved in new theories of love and marriage, of birth control and child care, of diet and hygiene . . . .”

Many a paradox hangs by the A&C; aesthetic. One is the way a liberal mind-set is expressed by a somewhat dictatorial architecture where every design is imposed by the builder down to the last stained-glass sconce, suggesting that liberals can be as coercive and self-righteous as their conservative opposites. Another is the clearly expensive quality of a style that was supposed to benefit the poor by producing handsome designs that could be executed by a humble do-it-yourselfer to furnish his hovel and enhance his self-esteem. No wonder “artsy-craftsy” became a satirical term.

And no wonder we forget all that the minute we look at this installation. Its centerpiece is the reassembled and reconstructed dining room of the 1905 Henry M. Robinson house. By prevailing Victorian standards the room must have appeared stark and rather casual. By ours it’s fairly formal, elaborate, low-ceilinged and dark. One observer thinks the former Midwestern owners of such houses were comforted by reminders of winter and the old homestead but Makinson insists that such rooms were Pasadena practical--cooler in summer and warmer in winter.

The room’s centerpiece is a stained glass chandelier that can be raised and lowered with an elaborate set of leather straps and pulleys. The Greenes clearly loved intricate craftsmanship to the point of fetish but they loved integrated design even more.

Anyone’s reaction to such an environment is finally a matter of personal taste, but it would take a veritable Philistine to not ultimately resist the whispered care and grace that unites this room into a place offering thoughtful relaxation.

Artistic qualities of the Greenes’ furniture play even more clearly when pieces are seen in isolation in the main gallery, designed, like the rest, by Jim and Janeen Marrin. Here Greene furniture is seen developing from an early low side table, clearly influenced by Gustave Stickley, to a 1909 sideboard from the William R. Thorsen house, Berkeley. Unmistakably Oriental in influence, it’s one of those rare pieces of furniture that jumps category.

The room is decorated with period objects d’art , and paintings. High on one wall are three landscapes by Charles Greene. Hardly masterpieces, but they do remind one of both Turner and recent California Light and Space art. On evidence, the brothers were among our earliest visionary idealists.