Not To Be Missed
A “New and Native” Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – through October 18
by Anthony Barzilay Freund

“Greene and Greene were to the West Coast what Frank Lloyd Wright was to the Midwest,” explains Nonie Gadsden, Carolyn and Peter Lynch Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “I think that gets across their level of importance to even those unfamiliar with the Greene brothers’ work.”
Since the summer, Gadsden has had ample opportunity to proselytize the significant contributions of Charles Sumner Greene (1868-1957) and Henry Mather Greene (1870-1954) to the history of American architecture and decorative arts. The museum is currently hosting “A ‘New and Native’ Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene,” after stints at the Huntington, in San Marino, California, and at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. The show, which includes furniture, decorative details and architectural renderings and photographs of twenty-five of the firm’s commissions, runs through October 18.
Greene and Greene were early leaders of the American Arts and Crafts movement, which, like the English model of John Ruskin and William Morris, reacted against the Industrial Revolution by promoting a return to handicrafts and finding inspiration in nature. Though primarily associated with California (they worked in Pasadena where many of their most important commissions — among them the Gamble House, for soap heir David Gamble and his family, and the Robert R. Blacker House — still stand), they lived in Boston from 1888 to 1893, studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and apprenticing at some of the city’s leading architectural firms.
Gadsden’s installation includes an opening gallery that sets the local scene at the end of the 19th century, bringing to life the aesthetic and intellectual forces that were shaping the young architects’ distinctive style. Particularly fascinating is a display case jam-packed with Japanese ceramics from the Edward Sylvester Morse Collection, for which the museum was engaged in a high-profile fund-raising effort during the Greenes’ sojourn in town.
After touring the show earlier this month, I spoke with Gadsden about the relevance of Greene and Greene today and why Boston — and beyond — should care about their considerable achievements.

WHY — AND HOW — DID YOU BRING THE EXHIBTION TO BOSTON? Greene and Greene material is so beautiful and so meticulously done that it’s a great way of showing the Arts and Crafts movement to our audience. But before bringing it to Boston, we needed to do a bit more justification for why it should be here and why Bostonians should care about two guys from Pasadena. So I dug a little deeper into their life here and presented a paper on that period at the symposium that opened the exhibition at the Huntington Museum last November.
I couldn’t help but get totally immersed in the research. And it’s all wrapped up with the early days of the MFA and its major players.

UNLIKE ITS FIRST TWO INCARNATIONS, YOUR INSTALLATION CONTEXTUALIZES THE GREENES IN BOSTON. I GOT A PARTICULAR KICK OUT OF THE MORSE CABINET OF JAPANESE POTTERY FROM THE 17TH TO THE 19TH CENTURY, WHICH EXEMPLIFIES HOW FASCINATION WITH JAPAN, NEWLY OPEN TO THE WEST, WAS SWEEPING BOSTON. JAPANESE DESIGN DEEPLY INFORMS GREENE AND GREENE’S WORK. We never see things displayed in that manner these days, just jumbled up on the shelf to be looked at in a scientific way as well as an artistic way. But I really wanted to show people this is what the Greenes saw and this is how they saw it right here in this institution. And this is what they were reacting to and you can see those connections or you can make your own.

YOU ALSO CONNECT THEM TO CERTAIN ARCHITECTS, LIKE HENRY HOBSON RICHARDSON. I don’t think you could be an architecture student in Boston in the late 1880’s and early ’90’s and not be influenced by Richardson, who died in 1886. He was the father of so many of those early Arts and Crafts ideas in American architecture and he was so influential and had trained so many of the key people in Boston that the Greenes studied with or apprenticed for.

WHAT BUILDINGS DID THE BROTHERS SEE? Trinity Church being the most important of his buildings. They lived on St. James Avenue, which is just around the corner from Trinity Church. They walked by the church every day on their way to their MIT classes, held in what was then called the New Building, on the corner of Clarendon and Boylston. And Trinity Church is on Copley Square, then known as Art Square, which had the latest and greatest architecture built around it. The MFA was there in a Gothic-style building, and Peabody & Stearns had the New Old South Church. And as the Greenes were living there, the Boston Public Library was being created by McKim, Mead and White. So they had all of these nationally or internationally known architects around them, either working on projects or having just finished them.

AND WHAT ABOUT FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED? WAS HE BUILDING HIS EMERALD NECKLACE THEN? Yes, this was the time of the creation of the Back Bay, which was almost entirely landfill. Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace of parks, which included the Fens [across from which the MFA’s current building sits] was intended as a way to beautify these areas but also provided such necessary hygienic elements as a drainage system.
So there are a lot of artists and architects in the area; lots of excitement, along with the fact that MIT was the first school of architecture in the U.S., founded in 1868. All this was centering Boston as an architectural hub.

GREENE AND GREENE WERE STEEPED IN THE AVANT-GARD AESTHETIC MOVEMENT OF THEIR DAY. BUT THEN THEY FELL OUT OF FASHION, OR, I SHOULD SAY, ARTS AND CRAFTS DID. Yes, in fact, they were very modern and it wasn’t until the 1950’s when modernist architects started citing them as an influence on their work that people started paying attention again.

IN WHAT WAY WERE THE MID-CENTURY MODERNISTS INFLUENCED BY THEM? I think it was the open plan, the integration of exterior and interior spaces, the low overhanging roof lines and the tremendous attention to how functional needs dictate the plan.
Also, they did the entire thing from soup to nuts: the building, the interiors, the furniture, the landscaping.

THE MORE FAMOUS EXAMPLE OF SUCH A PRACTICE IS FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S. WERE THEY FRIENDS? Well, they knew each other. Wright visited with Charles Greene in Pasadena, in 1909 or 1911, right at the height of the Greenes’ career. Wright and Charles Greene were both very aware of marketing themselves and aware of their egos, and neither would admit to being influenced by the other. But they did admire each other’s work.

OF COURSE WRIGHT CONTINUED TO CREATE WELL INTO THE 20TH CENTURY, WITH HIS STYLE EVOLVING CONSIDERABLY FROM ITS PRAIRIE-SCHOOL ORIGINS. Which wasn’t the case with Greene and Greene. The peak of their career, which was surprisingly short, was 1907 to around 1911 or 1912. That’s because Charles, the more creative of the two — he was the dreamer who always wanted to be an artist but had followed his father’s instructions to go to architecture school — said, “Okay I’ve had enough of this.” He moved away from Pasadena up to a bohemian community in Carmel-by-the-Sea, near San Francisco, and started painting and writing poetry and studying Buddhism. Without Charles’s creativity, Henry was able to continue for a while, a good fifteen years, but a lot of his work is recycling the old ideas. There wasn’t the same spark.

FASHION HAD PASSED THEM BY, BUT HAD THEY STAYED TOGETHER….They may have rolled with it. And that’s something we’ll never know.

THE LAST GALLERY OF YOUR INSTALLATION SHOWS THE BROTHERS’ CAREERS AFTER THE SPLIT AND, IN ESSENCE, HOW IMPORTANT THE COLLABORATION WAS. The whole exhibition shows the importance of collaboration not just between the Greenes but also with their craftsmen, particularly the Hall Brothers, who did their furniture, and Sturdy-Lange, the company that did their stained-glass work.
Their early projects, as exemplified by the Tichenor House, 1904-05, in Long Beach, were before they started working with these craftsmen who were able to meet the challenges of their designs. Though the work is strong, it doesn’t have the signature Greene and Greene panache and polish.

CAN YOU POINT TO A FEW PIECES IN THE SHOW THAT EXEMPLIFY HOW IMPORTANT THEY WERE TO THE GREENES? Oh sure. There’s the Gamble House chiffonier, which is just drop-dead gorgeous and covered with inlay. The inlay and all of the rounded edges really show the craftsmanship of John and Peter Hall’s workshop
The Halls were Swedish immigrants. They were doing no architectural work until they met the Greenes and then the collaboration just took off between these two sets of brothers.
The chiffonier also shows their tremendous skill not only with wood inlay, like ebony and oak, but with a tremendous amount of stone, such as lapis lazuli, turquoise and malachite. Neighboring pieces in the exhibition incorporate pewter, copper, silver and other metals.
Then there’s the Blacker House newel-post lantern with its Japanese, pagoda-like roof, which combines the woodwork of the Hall brothers, with very fine, iridescent glass by Harry Sturdy and Emil Lange. It’s got a lovely, floral design across one side and birds on another.

WHERE CAN THAT PIECE USUALLY BE FOUND? It’s on loan from a private collection. The Blacker House still stands but it was completely stripped of its original interior furnishings. There was literally a yard sale in the 1940’s and all its pieces are now spread here and yond. That sale is where the majority of institutional pieces come from. For instance, we have a Blacker House piano bench in our collection.
The Gamble house is the only Greene and Greene project that has all its original architectural detail and furniture in tact. And it’s open to the public. [Gamblehouse.org.] There are sixty to eighty other houses that still exist, a few with some original furnishings, most without. But those are all privately owned.

ARE THEY PROTECTED IN ANY WAY? Yes, the city of Pasadena has put some very strong restrictions on the houses and even the interiors, which is very unusual.
The owners of the Blacker house, by the way, have done a fantastic job of restoring the house and of recreating all the original furnishings. When original material comes on the market today it can exorbitantly expensive. [For instance, an armchair from the Blacker House entry hall sold at Sotheby’s last fall for $TK, against a $300,000 to $500,000 estimate.]

THE BOSTON MATERIAL IS SO COMPELLING, BUT THE WHOLE INSTALLATION IS REALLY BEAUTIFUL. AND I LOVE THE VIDEO YOU’VE GOT PLAYING FRONT AND CENTER, WHICH SHOWS MANY OF GREENE AND GREENE’S HOUSES AS THEY LOOK TODAY. The video monitor has been part of the show for the whole run, but we integrated it into the main gallery instead of installing it in a side room,
I felt very strongly as I was working with Tomomi Itakura, our wonderful exhibition designer, that it was important to bring the architecture to life in what is, after all, a show about architects. Her installation pays homage to the Greenes’ architecture.

SO IF VISITORS TO BOSTON HAVE CAUGHT THE BUG FROM THIS SHOW, WHERE CAN THEY FIND ARTS AND CRAFTS DESIGN LOCALLY ONCE “A ‘NEW AND NATIVE’ BEAUTY” COMES DOWN? Trinity Church must be the first stop. That’s at top of every list. And then we will have a new gallery devoted to the Arts and Crafts Movement in the American Wing, which we’ll be opening in November 2010.

THAT WILL BE JUST ONE OF THE FIFTY-FOUR NEW GALLERIES DEVOTED TO THE ARTS OF THE AMERICAS THAT YOU ALL ARE INSTALLING IN THE AMBITIOUS NORMAN FOSTER DESIGNED ADDITION TO THE MUSEUM. Yes, it will include everyone from Greene and Greene to Gustav Stickley to Frank Lloyd Wright. Trying to encapsulate the Arts and Crafts movement in one gallery has been an extraordinary challenge. But a wonderful one.