Simplicity’s stickler

The work of Gustav Stickley has been celebrated twice -- once at the beginning of the 20th century and again at its end. In between lay more than half a century of obscurity. As a leading figure of the fin de siecle American Arts and Crafts movement, Stickley was joined at that pinnacle only by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Midwest and Charles and Henry Greene in California. Yet while Wright and the Greenes worked in the more dramatic field of architecture, Stickley’s dominant roles were as furniture maker, editor and Arts and Crafts evangelist.

Though his studios were capable of producing exquisite work for a high-end clientele, Stickley’s trademark achievement was his sturdy, elegantly simple furniture and accouterments for middle- and low-income Americans. He would probably have been stunned that, in 1999, a private collector paid $596,500 at Christie’s in New York for an early 20th century Stickley sideboard that he had designed for himself. In this first definitive book on Stickley, historian David Cathers’ crisp analysis and lean prose seem especially suited to its subject.

Gustavus Stoeckel, later Anglicized to Gustav Stickley, was the first of 11 children born to poor German American immigrant parents Barbara and Leopold Stoeckel, in Osceola, Wis., in 1858. As a youth, Gustav assisted in his father’s work as a farmer and stonemason, but his parents divorced and, around 1875, Barbara Stoeckel took her children to northeastern Pennsylvania. There her prosperous brother, Joseph Schlager, operated a chair factory that afforded his nephew the training for his life’s work. After a four-year apprenticeship, Gustav was made plant foreman, which fostered his creative talents and trained him to manage workers -- a skill that would prove increasingly useful in his business alliances.

In 1896, with his wife, Eda, and their five children, he moved to a substantial house in Syracuse, N.Y., where he had opened a factory of his own, and the family was able to vacation in the Adirondacks. There, Stickley noted the sturdy, rustic architecture and furniture of the mountain camps. To keep up with new trends, there was also travel to Europe and a succession of world’s fairs on both sides of the Atlantic. Like Wright and the Greenes, he was greatly affected by the “Sezessionstil” designs at the German and Austrian pavilions of the 1904 St. Louis fair. A trip to California that year proved especially important. There, Stickley marveled at the Greenes’ Pasadena Arts and Crafts houses, which he then began to publish in the Craftsman, the journal of ideas, news items and paeans to “the simple life” that he edited from 1901 to 1916. He also used them as models for his “Craftsman bungalows,” which he propagated in his magazine and in pattern books.

With strong debts to philosophers John Ruskin and William Morris, to the British and Continental Arts and Crafts movements and to the stoically disciplined minimalism of Japan, American practitioners of the Arts and Crafts persuasion called for designs of a “handmade” integrity in protest against many 19th century machine-made products that seemed tastelessly derivative. Indeed, the cathartically simple Arts and Crafts aesthetic drew its initial inspiration from a perceived imperative to challenge the machine. In historian Miles Orvell’s words, the larger conflict was a generational clash between the 19th century Victorian “culture of imitation” and the 20th century Modernist “culture of authenticity.” Like his kindred spirits in Britain, Europe and Asia, Stickley epitomized the latter.

“At first, in obedience to public demand, I produced in my workshops adaptations of the historic styles, but always under silent protest: my opposition developing, as I believe, out of a course of reading, largely from Ruskin and Emerson, which I followed in my youth,” he wrote in 1898. “More and more did I resent these imitations which, multiplied to infinity, could not preserve a spark of the spirit, the vivacity, the grace of their originals.”

He was determined that the imitations would stop and that his work should strive for its own authenticity. An early advertisement for this new work in 1900 anticipated the slogans of the larger Modern movement by celebrating the pieces as “angular, plain, and severe.” Unlike much Modern design, however, they were also comfortable -- even cozy. Epitomizing this achievement was the “bow arm Morris chair,” with its subtly curved arms and slightly tapered legs. Most of his equally beautiful contemporary pieces bore only catalog numbers: the massive, rectilinear, intricately constructed “#188 settle” (1902), for example, or the artfully well-proportioned “#967 sideboard” (1902). After 1900, Stickley’s work, mission and growing renown would have been unthinkable without the Craftsman.

As an artistic perfectionist and a managerial realist, Stickley saw the need of delegating tasks to gifted designers, writers, managers and secretaries. These included architect Harvey Ellis, whose silver-inlay L’Art Nouveau designs expanded the standard, no-nonsense Stickley aesthetic without compromising its sturdy practicality. As a writer-editor for the Craftsman, Irene Sargent became an essential cog in the Stickley machine. Equally important support came from such figures as delineator Louise Shrimpton, writer George Wharton James, cabinet maker Peter Hansen, metallurgist Valentine Kluge and textile designer Blanche Baxter. Stickley, to his credit, recognized their artistry and their importance to his mission, but he failed to accord them the recognition they deserved. One of the achievements of Cathers’ book is to give those professionals their due.

As Stickley grew more successful with his furniture, bungalows and publications, he dreamed of ever-larger success and, bit by bit, moved his operations to New York City. There, in 1913, in his 12-story Craftsman Building, he turned what had been an essentially rural mission into an urban empire, with separate floors for workshops, showrooms, editorial offices, lounges and a restaurant. It was, in effect, a Craftsman department store, which he replicated in Boston and Washington D.C. On the blank sidewall of his New York skyscraper, Stickley emblazoned his familiar logo topped incongruously by a cunning rendition of a simple Craftsman cottage.

In 1911, to counter accusations that he was overurbanizing his bucolic style, Stickley moved his family from Syracuse to his new Craftsman Farms in New Jersey, a rural community, furnished from his workshops, designed as a model for pursuing the simple life. But to finance the community’s expansion, Stickley’s furniture prices rose. Whereas William Morris had once decreed, “Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” the popular riff on that noble phrase became, “Have nothing in your home that you do not believe to be rare or know to be expensive.”

In his Faustian bargain for fame and success, Stickley’s empire became overextended and by the mid-teens was bankrupt. The last issue of the Craftsman appeared in December 1916. Eda died in 1919 and Stickley returned to Syracuse to live with his children and slip into obscurity. Remnants of his legacy survived in the work of his younger brothers, L. and J.G. Stickley, whose excellence through the years had frequently rivaled his own. Yet in the 1920s they, like many of their Arts and Crafts colleagues, moved onto a more historicist track. Stickley died in 1942, his work neglected and forgotten, until its revival in the 1970s, when the Craftsman craze led to soaring revaluations of his rediscovered treasures.

Divining taste and fashion is a daunting and risky task, but clearly in the stress and hurry of American life in an ever-more-complicated late 20th century, there arose a felt need for the elegantly simple strength of Stickley’s calm designs. Cathers tells Stickley’s story with empathy and eloquence, giving long overdue credit to his gifted collaborators. His work, and theirs, confirms their poignant slogan: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” *