Widely celebrated as the father of the Studio Furniture Movement, Wharton Esherick is one of the most important furniture designers of the twentieth century. Presenting his preserved hillside house and studio, this book showcases seven decades of innovative woodwork and sculpture, embodying his influence on American art and design. Wharton Esherick (1887–1970) stands as a pivotal figure in 20th-century American art, craft, and design. Now known as the Wharton Esherick Museum, the artist’s self-proclaimed “autobiography in three dimensions” on Valley Forge Mountain, constructed between 1926 and 1966, served as his creative epicenter and a vibrant community hub. To introduce Esherick’s visionary work to a broader public, this book draws on the museum’s collection of almost 3,000 objects, many never before seen outside his home and studio, following Esherick’s evolution from paintings and woodcut illustrations to his revolutionary fusion of furniture and organic sculpture. Through fully contextualizing iconic works in Esherick’s own space, this book immerses readers in his creative world while capturing his unparalleled artistic contributions to the realms of furniture, architecture, prints, drawings, and sculpture.

An exploration of Wharton Esherick's artistic evolution during the early decades of the twentieth century. Based on the exhibition in the Kamin and Kroiz Galleries of the University of Pennsylvania, this work expands upon the exhibition's themes with well over 300 vibrant images and current research, including an essay by Paul Eisenhauer, Curator of the Wharton Esherick Museum. Esherick experimented with woodcarving and printmaking, laying the foundations for his emergence as an artist of remarkable range. He produced paintings and woodblock prints, set designs, sculpture, furniture, and architecture. He and his community of friends created an artistic circle in which arts and crafts were joined, and in which radical new ideas flourished, helping to shape the course of American Modernism. This book will be a treasure for all who appreciate twentieth-century modernism.

Wharton Esherick (1887- 1970) lived to create. He found his true voice in sculpture, working primarily in local woods he gathered from the forest surrounding his home and studio in rural Pennsylvania. The spiritual father of the contemporary studio furniture movement in America, he pioneered the way for successive generations of woodworking artists to develop their original designs. His work blurs the traditional distinctions between sculpture and furniture, form and function. Written by Esherick's son-in-law, this book features photographs of Esherick's most important artworks as well as the woodland studio he designed, built, and furnished over the course of several decades.

Daring Design: The Impact of Three Women on Wharton Esherick's Craft explores the significant impact of three women-Helene Fischer, Hanna Weil, and Marjorie Content-on the artistic development and career of sculptor and studio craftsman Wharton Esherick.

Complete set of the thirteen woodcut illustrations used in the 1924 edition of Song of the Broad-axe by Walt Whitman, published by Centaur Press in Philadelphia. Each woodcut is titled and numbered "16". The titles are (as they appear in the book): No.I, Ship struck in storm, Beauty of woodmen, building, the forger, hell of war, The great city, of the best-bodied mothers, the hammers-men, the headsman, solid forest, the liquor-bar, and No.II.

Tour the private homes of three of the most esteemed wood artist/craftsmen of the modern era.

Illustrated with 200 stunning photographs and encompassing objects from furniture and ceramics to jewelry and metal, this definitive work from Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton showcases some of the greatest pieces of American crafts of the last two centuries. Potter Craft

An intimate monograph of the professional and personal creations of a midcentury design legend. Irving Harper is the most famous designer you have never heard of. Working as an associate at the office of George Nelson in the 1950s and ’60s, Harper was responsible for such icons of midcentury design as the Marshmallow sofa, the Ball clock, and numerous Herman Miller textile designs. Harper’s unrecognized contribution to this seminal era of design, and his incredible paper sculptures (made in his spare time to "relieve stress"), are presented for the first time in this book. An essay by design critic Julie Lasky introduces Harper’s commercial design work, recognizable designs from graphics to domestic goods to furniture that are still coveted and appreciated today, designed for the offices of Raymond Loewy, George Nelson, and then his own studio Harper + George. The second part of the book documents Harper’s extensive paper sculptures, which have never been exhibited. More than three hundred works fill Harper’s house and barn in Rye, New York, where this array of fantastical people and animal sculptures was created from modest and inexpensive materials as diverse as spaghetti and toothpicks in addition to paper. Images of Harper’s home, filled with furniture and objects of his own design as well as his paper sculptures, offer a rare glimpse into a Modern design enthusiast’s paradise.Offering insight into an important era of American design as well as the prolific output of a creative mind, this book promises to be the first to recognize Irving Harper’s contribution to the field and will appeal to fans of Modern design.

Contemporary artists probe the impact of human intervention on the environment Just as artists of the 19th and 20th centuries participated in forging an American natural history as explorers, cataloguers, collectors, and early environmentalists, contemporary artists continue to incorporate and comment on the natural world in their art. Motivated by the inexorable rise of urban-industrial development and the subsequent deterioration of our planet, artists confront the vulnerability of our environment and the effects of global climate change to illustrate the continued relevance of ecology and nature conservation to contemporary artistic practice. In Fragile Earth: The Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art, leading artists Jennifer Angus, Mark Dion, Courtney Mattison, and James Prosek make natural elements their medium conceptually and literally, from prints created with eel bodies, to ceramic sculpture mimicking coral bleaching, cabinets filled with colorful plastic collected from oceans and rivers, and walls covered with shockingly beautiful, preserved insects. Bringing an artistic perspective to natural science, these essays and written conversations showcase the persuasive role artists can play in advocating for the preservation of our earth.

An intimate and revealing collection of photographs of astonishingly beautiful, iconic, and undiscovered mid-century interiors. Among significant mid-century interiors, none are more celebrated yet underpublished as the homes created by architects and interior designers for themselves. This collection of newly commissioned photographs presents the most compelling homes by influential mid-century designers, such as Russel Wright, George Nakashima, Harry Bertoia, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eva Zeisel, among others. Intimate as well as revelatory, Williamson’s photographs show these creative homes as they were lived in by their designers: Walter Gropius’s historic Bauhaus home in Massachusetts; Albert Frey’s floating modernist aerie on a Palm Springs rock outcropping; Wharton Esherick’s completely handmade Pennsylvania house, from the organic handcarved staircase to the iconic furniture. Personal and breathtaking by turn—these homes are exemplary studies of domestic modernism at its warmest and most creative.