For thirty years Wendell Castle has been sawing, laminating, sanding, and burnishing wood - moving "in two directions at once," he explains, "one more like furniture" and the other "more sculpture." Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. The fanciful pieces he painstakingly handcrafts in his studio - an old soybean mill in Scottsville, New York - certainly look like no one else's tables and chairs. Even the names of the woods chosen are evocative - purple-hearted amaranth, beeswing narra, Gabon ebony, Baltic birch, Australian lacewood, curly English sycamore, Swiss pear. Then, Castle puts them together in such unexpected ways that the viewer is astonished by the workmanship and delighted with the wit. All this effort (one piece can easily consume six hundred hours) is expended to achieve Castle's ultimate goal: "to make furniture into art."
It would seem he has succeeded. Castle's work is included in the collections of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among other institutions. Connoisseurs like Malcolm Forbes and J. Patrick Lannan purchased pieces for their private collections. Recently, one piece from his 1985 clock series, Sun God, sold at Sotheby's for $120,000, plus commission.
'Unique Position'
Castle holds a unique position in the history of handcrafted furniture, according to Davira S. Taragin, curator of twentieth century decorative arts and design at the Detroit Institute of Arts and organizer of the retrospective. "He made us rethink the design, the construction, the purpose, and the function of furniture," she observes. "By example, he encouraged fellow furniture craftsmen to move from absolute reverence for wood to an emphasis on concept and meaning."
"His work transcends furniture in a purely sculptural way," comments Janet Kardon, director of the American Craft Museum. "The pieces occupy their space with great presence." An early supporter, gallery owner Barbara Fendrick, adds, "In my opinion, Wendell was the first person to elevate furniture into an art form, taking it out of the crafts galleries and into the fine arts galleries. His work has tremendous vitality and energy. It always cheers me up to look at a piece of his."
Castle likes to think of himself as American's first art furniture maker, a field that has expanded remarkably through the inspire contributions of artists as varied as Richard Artschwager, Scott Burton, Robert Wilson, Ettore Sottsass, and Frank Gehry. Castle began "reinventing" furniture back in the late 1950s while still a student at the University of Kansas.
Born in Emporia, Kansas, in 1932, Castle is wiry, bearded man, gentle and forthright, who is doing exactly what he wants to do. "I didn't grow up in an environment that knew anything about art," he says simply. Reprieved from a business administration program by the encouragement of an art teacher, Castle was studying for his Masters of Fine Arts in sculpture when he set out to make a very abstract chair. "I had no woodworking skills whatsoever. I never had a woodworking class outside of seventh-grade shop. The fact that I was using lumber of certain dimensions dictated certain things. I had to work with what was there, yet I wanted it to flow." The chair he constructed looks like a delicate balance of tree
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