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FeedDiamond in the Rough
The world-renowned Wharton Esherick Museum awaits its local coming-out.
Photo by Jared Castaldi Published February 24, 2010 at 03:02 PM
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Mansfield Bascom often asks visitors of the Wharton Esherick Museum what they think of its namesake’s impressionistic self-portrait. “Stereotypically, what kind of man do you think he painted?” poses the 86-year-old curator emeritus, who is also Esherick’s son-in-law.
From a prominent family in a far-different West Philadelphia, Esherick painted himself accurately in 1919: Tall and thin, he’s in the uniform of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, though he dropped out in 1910. “He appears rather aristocratic, doesn’t he?” Bascom probes. “A doctor maybe?”
“You don’t picture a guy swinging an axe, his favorite tool,” interjects Paul Eisenhauer, Bascom’s successor at the museum, which still uses the same Paoli mailing address Esherick used, though the master craftsman— whose famous furniture was as functional as it was sculptural—died in 1970.
Esherick first pursued painting. But as he began carving decorative frames for his art in 1920, his work gravitated to woodcut prints and then sculptures. Famed American author and friend Sherwood Anderson was among the first to provide focus for Esherick, telling him his frames were more interesting than his paintings.
By 1925, he’d carved 200-plus wood blocks, which illustrated less than a handful of books. One, Walt Whitman’s Song of the Broad Axe, celebrated its 85th anniversary last year.
Ultimately, Esherick progressed to furniture. In 1927, he completed a highly carved, heavy oak drop-leaf desk, storing his prints in its roll-out trays. Over the next 40 years, he created cubist and freeform sculptures—even entire interiors for what his museum calls “sculptural living environments.” In the process, Esherick bridged the gap between the Arts and Crafts and the studio furniture movements. By 1960, there was a spike in all crafts—the Craft Revival period.
“By his death, he’d become the grand old man in his field—the dean of American craftsmen,” says Eisenhauer, a woodworker and onetime sociology professor. “He was aware that recognition was going to come his way, but he never saw the money.”
A few upcoming events could bring museum visitors out of the woodwork, so to speak. March 5-28, the Wharton Esherick Museum is staging a print show at the Phoenix Village Art Center in Phoenixville in conjunction with Philagrafika 2010, an international festival of print arts in Philadelphia. A portfolio of 12 restrikes of Esherick prints will be released, and a March 20 exhibit will be held at the studio. Plans are to restrike a poster he designed for Media’s Hedgerow Theatre, where Esherick designed several stage sets and made chairs, tables and staircases. His daughters, Ruth and Mary, were actresses there and elsewhere.
This fall also marks the release of the biography Wharton Esherick: The Journey of a Creative Mind, penned by Bascom, Ruth’s husband. And there’s a print exhibition planned in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania. Tentatively titled Wharton Esherick and the Birth of the American Modern and slated to debut in October, it also will include writer Theodore Dreiser’s ephemera and many of Anderson’s papers. It was Eisenhauer’s research that solidified the connections between the three artists.
These days, traffic at the Wharton Esherick Museum is slow, despite recent citations in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, Destination Art: 100 Best Art Sites You Have to Visit and Fine Homebuilding magazine’s “25 Most Important Houses in America.” “We’re on the same page as the Biltmore and Monticello, so that’s pretty good company,” Eisenhauer says.
Bascom wishes the museum was on more local folks’ to-do lists. “We’re better known internationally,” he says.
It could be the location—tucked away on one side of Valley Forge Mountain off a winding road Tredyffrin Township won’t service in the winter. That alone keeps the site closed in January and February. “People don’t comprehend what this is,” says Eisenhauer. “You don’t understand it unless you come see it and feel it.”
The lack of notoriety has something to do with Esherick himself, who didn’t seek publicity. He had three children: Ruth, Mary (who died in 1996) and Peter, who lives near Allentown. When their father died at 82, three years after suffering a stroke, he left behind about 200 pieces of his art—the museum’s contents.
