The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Workshop of the World: Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia

A prescient history

The exhibit, encompassing 250 objects spread across six galleries, showcases work challenging societal norms from 1876 to the present. It begins with the Centennial Exposition, when nations of the world came to Philadelphia to celebrate America’s 100th birthday. The industrial age was on the ascendant, and international delegations brought their best, filling Fairmount Park with work representing their heritage, art, and technology.

The Centennial was wildly popular: about 10 million paying visitors attended, at a time when the national population was just 46 million. Even in retrospect, Philadelphia’s Centennial celebration was significant.

It was also prescient. Though industrialization’s advantages were obvious, questions were rising about side effects: polluted streams and air; shoddy, even dangerous products; and the exploitation of workers for the enrichment of industrial barons. The concerns of the Progressive era, roughly from 1890 to 1920, foreshadow those currently swirling around artificial intelligence, from human and environmental impacts to the influence of unelected elites with limitless wealth.

Arts and Crafts economics

The Arts and Crafts movement opposed industrialization’s dehumanizing aspects. Its advocates admired art of the Middle Ages. They rejected post-industrial production methods and gaudy ornamentation, endorsing simple designs, authentic materials, and making things by hand.

Yet hand-crafting is slow, and its products are expensive, affordable only to the elites the movement eschewed. In Philadelphia, the Arts and Crafts community sought to maintain artistic integrity while remaining economically feasible.

Local Arts and Crafts enclaves

Creative enclaves formed in the suburbs, along rail lines that transported workers to places such as Rose Valley, Bryn Athyn, New Hope, and Arden. The exhibit is rich in materials from the communities, each taking its own approach to the challenge of making art and a living.

In Delaware County, Rose Valley, active from 1901 to 1906, had difficulty retaining skilled craftspeople. Its pottery workshop lasted just a year, but furniture was more successful. Pieces designed by community founder, woodworker William L. Price, include an oak Armchair (c. 1901-06) and Folding Chair (c. 1903). The former resembles an Adirondack chair, low to the ground with a reclining back, and arms ending in paddles wide enough to support a book or a drink. The folding chair, similarly simple, is more elegant, with slender, smoother supports and a leather seat.

Price’s drawings reveal a different character entirely. His Typewriter Case (1904) is a baroque fantasy, a Medieval chapel so ornate it’s impossible to see how a typewriter could be extracted—perhaps an intentional feature, to discourage the mechanism’s use.

Human will, divine purpose

In Montgomery County, Bryn Athyn was founded by John Pitcairn in 1892 for members of the Swedenborgian faith. Artisanal workshops were established in 1913 expressly to furnish Bryn Athyn Cathedral and Glencairn, the Pitcairn family home, now a museum. Only Medieval methods were used, and collaboration was encouraged. The prevailing belief was that creative work represented the alignment of human will and divine purpose.

Frank Jeck, a Hungarian immigrant, made furniture at Bryn Athyn from 1920 to 1940, including a carved cherry Crib (1922), a velvet-roofed fortress for a tiny sovereign, in which each adze-shaped corner is capped by a small watchtower.

Made by Mercer

At Moravian Pottery and Tileworks, founded in 1898 by Henry Chapman Mercer in Doylestown, Bucks County, creativity was subordinate to productivity. Relatively unskilled workers reproduced Mercer’s designs for handmade redware from local clay. Lower production costs made the venture, still in operation, financially successful. Mercer’s tiles, favored by architects, have been used across the country, including in Pennsylvania’s State Capitol, and at Mercer’s home, Fonthill Castle. His collection of preindustrial tools and objects is displayed in Doylestown’s Mercer Museum.

Mercer tableware and tiles are on view, rough-hewn and in subdued shades. Initially, Mercer pursued hand-thrown methods, but eventually employed pottery wheels and molds. The tile Musician: Viola da Gamba (1915), displayed with its mold, depicts a court musician in performance.

A Valley Forge masterpiece

It took 25 years and the contributions of numerous artisans to complete Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, an Episcopal church commemorating George Washington and the Continental Army, which camped in Valley Forge during the harsh winter of 1777-78. Religious and military symbols combine in the gothic structure, completed in 1928.

John C. Cornelius Jr.’s oak and brass Litany Desk (1917) is fronted by a Minute Man with his rifle, at parade rest. Hollingsworth Pearce’s six-sided lead and gilt Hanging Lamp recounts the life of Robert Morris, known as the Financier of the Revolution. Stained-glass windows, murals, mosaics, and other interior decorations were fabricated by Nicola D’Ascenzo and D’Ascenzo Studios, which were organized in the Medieval style, staffed by a hierarchy of master crafters, journeymen, and apprentices.

The touch of Samuel Yellin, a blacksmith and metal designer who immigrated from what is now Ukraine, appears in gates, hardware, locks, and other chapel furnishings. Yellin’s whimsical sensibility is evident in the works on view. Rather than a slash for tightening, bolt heads bear the faces of kings, queens, and jacks, who seem to have escaped from a deck of cards. Yellin’s beautifully intricate wrought iron Fire Screen (1924) stands on the webbed feet of long-billed geese guarding each end. His Mail Tray (1929) is a desktop menagerie of birds and dogs. It has webbed feet too. Yellin ultimately led a workshop of 250 employees, and made his artistic-economic compromise in electric machinery, which sped production.

Still chasing creative freedom

Violet Oakley appears throughout the exhibition. Her vivid oil The Weavers of New Hope (1920) depicts Ethel and Donald Davenport, who in 1916 purchased an antique loom to handweave traditional patterns. Oakley shows the Davenports in their workshop. Ethel, in the forefront, is presented as the archetype of a heroic peasant artisan, seated at her loom. Her strong, stolid demeanor suggests the Statue of Liberty.

At heart, Philadelphia’s Arts and Crafts practitioners were—and still are—pursuing liberty. Creative freedom, yes, but also what industrial-age workers sought, and workers today still seek: to labor in safety, for fair pay and reasonable hours, and to be protected against moneyed elites who trample individual rights chasing ever greater profits.

At top: Violet Oakley’s 1920 ‘The Weavers of New Hope’, on view in ‘Workshop of the World’. (Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)

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