FINDING HIS VOICE
Esherick’s woodblock carving soon led him to explore more angular forms and themes characteristic of Cubism and German Expressionism. This new style was evident in some of his early forays into producing furniture, most of which was made out of necessity for his growing family, and manifested itself further in the private commissions that would follow.
In the early 1930s, Esherick met his first major patron, Helene Fischer, who started pushing him to follow his own voice and move away from traditional forms of design. “The idea of using furniture as more than just something functional was appealing to him,” says Eisenhauer. “He really saw what he was doing as sculpture. It was just that some of that sculpture happened to be furniture.”
BREAKING NEW GROUND
With the publicity that Esherick was getting from his commissions from Fischer and others, galleries in both Philadelphia and New York were eager to exhibit his work. His Spiral Stair, the stairway from his own studio, was even included in an exhibit at the 1940 New York World’s Fair.
As he continued to experiment with new ideas, his desire to create desks, tables and chairs was eclipsed by his enthusiasm for creating free-form, organic sculpture. The volume of work he was producing, and the rate at which it was being produced, meant that he was spending a tremendous amount of time in his studio on the hill, and the need for more space necessitated that it be expanded.
Adjacent to the stone bank portion of the studio, he added a kitchen along with a second bedroom above it for his son Peter. The exterior was clad in long planks of white oak installed vertically in a board-and-batten pattern. “If you look closely at it, you’ll notice that the walls aren’t plumb, which is by design,” says Eisenhauer. “The walls lean and there’s a rather prismatic roof; it’s a very playful, whimsical building.”
The studio would be expanded one final time with what Esherick referred to as his “silo.” The exterior of the silo is covered in stucco that had pigment mixed into it as it was applied, so the colors go all the way through.
“It’s an autumn leaves fresco that he did in October 1966, as the silo was being built,” says Eisenhauer. “It’s not a traditional cylindrical silo, it’s essentially three-sided, with an irregular oval form that fits into the corner of the existing building. By embellishing the silo with fresco, he was returning to his roots as a painter.”
A CRAFTSMAN’S LEGACY
Esherick continued to thrive creatively into the 1960s, with a number of large-scale interior commissions to go along with his groundbreaking furniture and sculptures. His work bridged the gap between the Arts and Crafts movement and Modernism, and his widespread influence can be seen in the scores of artists, sculptors and furniture designers that followed him, including Sam Maloof, Wendell Castle and George Nakashima. His work has frequently been exhibited in notable museums across the country, including The Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian, The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but much of his work today remains in the hands of the families who originally commissioned it.
His former home and studio was declared a National Historic Landmark for Architecture in 1993 and is now operated as the Wharton Esherick Museum. Esherick died in 1970 at the age of 82, and the museum opened to the public in 1972. It has been run as a nonprofit organization since then, and Esherick’s daughter Ruth and son-in-law Mansfield Bascom are still active with the museum. (Mansfield stepped down as museum curator in 2008 in order to finish writing the comprehensive biography Wharton Esherick: The Journey of a Creative Mind.) The couple currently live on-site in an adjacent workshop that was designed by Esherick and Louis Kahn in 1956.
“Esherick’s work was on a human scale; he wasn’t trying to make something monumental, he was trying to make something that worked, both aesthetically and structurally,” says Eisenhauer. “He believed that art and life should be integrated, and his pieces accomplish that in ways that a lot of art and furniture don’t. Esherick’s work had the power to make you feel at home, and that’s a very rare talent.”
For more information on the Wharton Esherick Museum, please visit WhartonEsherickMuseum.org
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