This volume focuses on a wide range of Victorian-era objects from Britain and the United States in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The following topics are explored: still-life painting in nineteenth-century America; the burgeoning Victorian print market; a fascinating sketchbook used by the English painter Edward Burne-Jones; a spectacular Gothic-style British wine cabinet; and a rare photographic album compiled by an aristocratic English family. Also featured, in a portfolio section, are other highlights from the museum’s Victorian collection, including furniture, paintings, photographs, textiles, and works on paper by such noted artists as Julia Margaret Cameron, William Morris, and John Everett Millais.

Objects of Desire: Victorian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago

Arts & Photography

Zelleke, Ghenete

BARTER, Judith A.

History & Criticism

Art Institute of Chicago

Wood can be bent into a vast range of configurations, making it a graceful and economical choice for furniture styles from the Biedermeier to the Bauhaus. This remarkably pliant material was also the stuff of broad transformations in aesthetics, design, manufacturing, and marketing. Furnishings by the Viennese companies Gebruder Thonet and Jacob &amp; Josef Kohn tell the history of Modernism, from the Biedermeier era, Victorian eclecticism, the Secession and Art Nouveau to the 1930s International Style. Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, and Adolf Loos were among the avant-garde architects who created designs in bentwood; Modernist visionaries like Le Corbusier celebrated early Thonet chairs for their purity of form. From the innovations of a German cabinetmaker to an international conglomerate with over ten thousand workers, the evolution of bentwood furniture encapsulates the industrial revolution itself. Against the Grain: Bentwood Furniture from the Collection of Fern and Manfred Steinfeld documents The Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition of an important private collection, with essays by three notable scholars and a catalog section of seventy-five duotone reproductions. Art Institute curator Ghenete Zelleke outlines the stylistic transformations of bentwood furniture between the 1850s and the 1920s, discussing consumer taste in the development of furniture forms and the impact of historical shifts and aesthetic reform. Eva B. Ottillinger examines both the technical developments that led to industrialization and the marketing strategies that enabled mass consumption. Nina Stritzler discusses Thonet after 1922 as a leader in tubular-steel furniture by such architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and assesses the impact of industrial design and the corporate style on post-World War furniture. Seventy-five excellent bentwood examples from the Steinfeld collection are illustrated in this catalog, with entries by Ghenete Zelleke. Against the Grain also includes a preface by the collector and an appendix with eighty black-and-white reproductions of other pieces of furniture in the collection.

Against the Grain: Bentwood Furniture from the Collection of Fern and Manfred Steinfeld

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Ottillinger, Eva B.

Stritzler-Levine, Nina

Art Institute Of Chicago

Antiques & Collectibles

Art Inst of Chicago Museum Shop

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