The following text is the original version of Chapter 15,
"Stepping Stones",
in the book Speaking of Furniture.
Bebe Pritam Johnson, Warren Eames Johnson.
Speaking of Furniture: Conversations with 14 American Masters.
(New York, London, Hong Kong: The Artist Book Foundation, 2013.)

In the exhibition proposal, CONNECTION, American Studio Furniture
serves as muse for art drawn principally from the permanent collection
of a major art institution like New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

CONNECTION
An Exhibition Proposal

The idea underlying the exhibition proposal, Connection, is that all artistic pursuits have elements in common whether it is something as mundane as practice or as ethereal as intention -- artistic pursuit is about chasing an idea into a form that has not existed before.

CONNECTION explores the ways in which an object of artistry is paired with another which can then create a synergistic effect. In this exhibition, exemplar pieces from the American studio furniture movement are paired with paintings and artifacts drawn principally from the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The pairings will be based on the similarities of intent shared by the artisan and artist as discerned by the curators. As muse, studio furniture will inform the choice of art.

Objects of art and craft are commonly found in rooms whose interiors are mutable, shaped and re-shaped over time depending on the choices made. To capture the impermanent nature of interiors, the background for the pairing of the objects can be established with graphic simplicity through expressive use of lighting and hanging panels or drops with calligraphic brush strokes and paint to simulate perspective and spatial relationships.

In the accompanying catalogue and wall legends, the curators put forward their reasons for pairing the artisan and artist which will reveal the common ground connecting the furniture and the art. The curatorial accounting for the pairings should provide a sense of “just rightness” to the pairs on exhibit no matter how disparate, at first sighting, their connection seems to be. Imagine, for example, a banner flying outside The Met with images of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Garry Knox Bennett’s Nail Cabinet on it,
followed by the question: What’s the Connection?

What’s the Connection?

Paul Cézanne – Jere Osgood
To construct the first step, it is important the furniture maker has a strong connection to the selected piece of furniture. Jere Osgood, for example, is well known for his use of the desk to express what he’s after in his furniture forms. The selection of the art to accompany the furniture will be determined by aspects of the furniture maker’s quest that mirror those of the artist as in the case of Osgood and Cézanne. Despite the different mediums in which they chose to express themselves, the pairings of artisan and artist should reveal the elements common to both of them.

For example, a pairing could include Jere Osgood’s rosewood and ash desk and a Paul Cézanne still life. Why Osgood and Cézanne? Because their quests have much in common. Although separated in time by nearly a century as well as their chosen mediums, both Osgood and Cézanne sought in their work to go beyond the appearance of things, both struggled to arrive at a truth about the structure of organic form.

In his furniture, Osgood is striving to attain a feeling familiar to us from our experience of nature. He knows that there aren't any straight lines in the organic world – not in the flow of water, nor in the movement of air currents, nor in the growth of trees. Osgood, the furniture maker, wants to create forms that are sympathetic to what he sees in nature. In order to realize these forms, however, he had to invent systems of construction that allowed him to reassemble wood in a manner relative to its growing form. With Osgood, the idea comes first, the technology follows.

Cézanne was obsessed with getting past mere appearance in order to arrive at what lies beneath the surface of things: the truth inherent in objects. Nothing embodies this quest more than his series of paintings of still lives with fruit as he sought to capture the inner structure of organic forms -- the geometric essentials of objects.

Notes on other pairings.

Wharton Esherick, (1887 –1970), was an American artist and sculptor who worked in the early to mid-20th-century. He is generally acknowledged as the visionary author of the American studio furniture movement because his work and his life embodied the notion of the artist-craftsman -- the underlying presumption of the studio furniture movement. Esherick saw no difference in making furniture, sculpture, painting or woodblock prints. He is represented in this exhibit, therefore, as both artisan and artist. His legacy was to bring personal expression into furniture.

Marcel Duchamp - Garry Knox Bennett
They were both troublemakers (artistically speaking); both were painters who recognized the figure in art before abandoning tradition and creating whirlwinds of controversy in the art and furniture worlds: Duchamp with Fountain (1917), his pedestaled porcelain urinal,
and Bennett with his Nail Cabinet (1979).

Pablo Picasso - Wendell Castle
In 1979, John Russell, the art critic of The New York Times, wrote: “No movement has had more than a handful of outstanding artists who give character to style and direction to the production of others. Wendell Castle,” Russell said, “has assumed this role since his graduation with a Master of
Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of Kansas in 1961.”1
In 20th- century art, Castle’s counterpart would be Pablo Picasso.

Thomas Hucker - late 16th-century Oribe ceramic tray
Hucker is deeply affected by Japanese aesthetics and Japan’s material culture especially objects related to the tea ceremony. As such, his furniture thinking often plays with opposites: poverty and elegance; mass and buoyancy, city and country; transparency without glass. Some of these formal constructs found their way into the making of the black slatted table. The top is an elevated plane that floats above the ground, and the lacquer of the top suggests the shimmer of the “heaven board” while the view through the negative space of the slats reinforce the “earth board.”

 Juan Miro- Judy Kensley McKie
Judy McKie McKie is after a feeling in her furniture rather than a defined concept. “I’m drawn to objects that have a certain feeling to them so that you can see they were made by a human being who thought a certain way as, for example, the person who carved the small Pennsylvania Dutch box with a daughter’s name on it.”2 McKie’s work evokes the directness of Inuit carving or Sumerian relics and other primitive work but it is equally at home with 20th century artists like Juan Miro.

1 Bulletin, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, [Winter 1979/80] p.50
2 Speaking of Furniture: Conversations with 14 American Masters, Bebe Pritam Johnson, Warren Eames Johnson. [The Artist Book Foundation. New York, London, Hong Kong: 2013].p. 97 Respectfully submitted, Bebe Pritam Johnson August 2023 once said, "It's very difficult to be simple." It is the deceptive simplicity of Miro's paintings and sculptures that can be understood in light of McKie’s observation and paired with her many furniture forms of animal, bird or fish imagery.

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