Charles Rohlfs’s Theatrical Furniture to Go on the Road
For a few years around 1900 journalists made pilgrimages to a barely marked furniture workshop in an attic over a bicycle factory in Buffalo. The workshop’s owner, a charismatic former actor named Charles Rohlfs (1853-1936), feigned some modesty in his dusty garret. But then he convinced the visiting reporters that his “artistic furniture” had no precedents or peers, only imitators.
The writers gushed over his square-framed oak pieces with sinuous carvings. “Never have art and utility been joined more skillfully than in these chairs and tables and desks,” wrote one in The Buffalo Daily Courier. The German magazine Dekorative Kunst described Mr. Rohlfs as “inventive and uninfluenced,” and Furniture Journal declared him a main inspiration for the far more famous and prolific designer Gustav Stickley.
“People had a voracious appetite for her work,” Mr. Cunningham said. “The writing sounds stilted now, but it was very modern for the time, and her enormous royalties freed her husband to do whatever he wanted.”
In 1887 the couple moved to Buffalo, where Rohlfs worked briefly for a stove manufacturer and then set up a workshop with a few freelance carvers. He channeled his theatrical tendencies into design. He suspended wall cabinets from thick chains like medieval moat crossings and sliced table bases with so much filigree that they seem deceptively unstable.
His desks are riddled with secret compartments and have finials shaped like leaping flames. Cell-like honeycombs are stretched taut across the backs of his chairs, as he did on the oak chair that he made for his own home around 1899 and which the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation is donating to the Metropolitan Museum.
“The work was so radical it defied categorization,” Mr. Cunningham said. “People must have thought it was positively freakish.” Although Rohlfs could have kept the business afloat on his wife’s income, instead he reinvented himself around 1910 as an executive for local business associations, including the Chamber of Commerce.
After Rohlfs’s death in 1936, his family hung onto much of his furniture inventory and archive. In 2005 Mr. Cunningham tracked down Rohlfs’s descendants in Colorado, and he and Sarah Fayen, an adjunct assistant curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, spent weeks poring over documents. “There were revelations in there,” Mr. Cunningham said. “We found diary entries about Anna Katharine spending months at a time hospitalized for depression, and many, many photos of furniture that no one knew had existed.”
Collectors also appreciate the paucity of fakes in the Rohlfs market. “Prices have not been high enough for long enough for faking to be worth the enormous trouble,” said Mr. Cunningham. Rohlfs marked most of his works with a hard-to-copy incised little drawing of a bow saw around an “R” and filled the incisions with red wax. Mr. Cunningham has seen, however, unsigned antiques with Rohlfs-esque straight lines and flowery carvings, misattributed to Rohlfs by wishful thinkers.
Tags: amber, antiques, bicycle, cabinets, chains, chairs, decorative art, elation, finial, finials, furniture, furniture inventory, gus, petite, photo, secret compartment, shape, tea, ties, urn, whRelated posts
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