- The book reproduces the artist’s most important works, including clocks and trompe l’oeil pieces, in full-color plates, including many details and multiple views
- Also includes black-and-white illustrations of working drawings by Castle and works by artists who have influenced him as well as other fine artists and architects who have designed furniture
- Wendell Castle has written, especially for this volume, an essay on commissions
The last generation has seen the maturation of the Studio Craft movement in America and a dramatic change in furniture making. The trailblazer in both phenomena has been Wendell Castle, an extraordinarily inventive and influential artist whose works as a whole embodies the development of handcrafted furniture as a major art form.
He has consistently challenged the traditional concept of wooden furniture design and construction, using wood to create new, highly expressive forms, thus becoming a major catalyst in the emergence of the art-furniture movement over the past thirty years. He has created innovative works that transcend a reverence for material and express a concern for meaning rather than function. His recent breakthrough work goes beyond obvious technical virtuosity and mastery of craft tradition to concentrate on conceptual issues. He has even moved into Post-Modernist architectural forms (although he denies the label), into design, and into painted sculpture.
Furniture by Wendell Castle places the artist’s oeuvre within the contexts of both the emerging postwar crafts movement and mainstream American art of the past three decades.
