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Oh, Those Polychrome Biomorphic Shapes: Dickson Carroll Brings Disney and the Space Age to Furniture
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12010 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
1,945 Words |
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Louise Sheldon
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Extravagant fantasy and ebullient humor have invaded a field rarely treated with such verve. The objects we use in everyday life, the very furnishings of our homes, have become a significant art form.
Within every trained architect, painter, or sculptor, it seems there is a craftsman struggling to break out of the confines of his profession. A growing tendency to indulge in alternative creative pursuits has brought about an interplay among disciplines and a cross-fertilization among talented professionals. The result has been a lively surge in the number of handcrafted objects made for the home. The creations of this new breed of designers can now be found in galleries that were once the austere domain of painting and sculpture. Even for this developing field, the sculpted furniture of Dickson Carroll of Washington, D.C., stands out as unique in concept and design. Carroll's polychrome biomorphic shapes find their niche somewhere between the Disneyesque and the space age, with a dose of Art Deco thrown in. His bed sprouts halo and wings, his pink-and purple-accented dresser recalls an old-time Wurlitzer, his stereo cabinet, with its bulging polyps and amoeba-like protrusions, resembles a street vendor thrusting out a huge purple tongue. A Carroll model for a public sculpture combines a clock tower in the shape of a witch's hat with a pagoda-like gazebo.
Despite the fantasy of his designs, Carroll's craft is rooted in our national tradition. Hand-wrought wooden furniture is as American as the great forests that once stretched across our land. In fact, one of the original attractions of this continent was its wood, already a vanishing resource in the Old World.
In the eighteenth century, almost everything a man needed was made of wood. William Penn described wood as "a substance with a soul," for every chip parades its autobiography in its grain and consistency. Given its certain feel and the fact that it can be carved by hand, man has always found pleasure working with wood.
The current crafts revival harks back to the nineteenth-
century revolt against academicism and to a search for
spiritual values to combat the effects of industrialization of daily life. The English Arts and Crafts Movement was led by William Morris, proponent of the idea that art should be not only beautiful, but useful. Reversing this theory, the famous Austrian painter Gustav Klimt proclaimed, "No sphere of human life is too insignificant or mean to offer scope for artistic endeavor." Art Nouveau, that transformer of style and taste, swept across Europe and the United States, permeating textile, glass, and furniture design. In this country, the elegant and attenuated forms, as well as Art Nouveau's predominant "whiplash" line, were introduced in objects used in daily living by artists such as Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Utilitarian Forms
During the 1920s the Bauhaus school of architecture strove
to reconcile artistic design with the commercial demands of
mass production. Architects like Le Corbusier, who admired
airplane and turbine engine design, stressed utilitarian form
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