From craft to industry: furniture designed by Edward Durell Stone for senator Fulbright

Magazine Antiques, May, 2004 by Mary Anne Hunting

Only yesterday, basket-weaving and wood-working were bandicraft operations in Arkansas. Today ... they have developed into an industry making modern furniture.

House and Garden, June 1951

I was not a Twentieth Century Chippendale," wrote the New York architect Edward Durell Stone (see Fig. 1) in his autobiography of 1962, (1) referring to the collection of "modern furniture" (2) that he had designed between 1950 and 1952 for the hardwood lumber and wood-parts company of his boyhood friend United States Senator James William Fulbright (see Fig. 1). The Fayetteville, Arkansas, venture, known as Fulbright Industries, lasted for little more than three years because it was, in the words of the senator, "a complete flop." (3)

And yet when first introduced, the collection of solid oak indoor and outdoor furniture was commended by contemporary architecture and design critics. The designer George Nelson (1908-1986) admired its relatively heavy bentwood members in Chairs, and William J. Hennessey (1901-1969) illustrated five pieces in Modern Furnishings for the Home (1952). (4) In 1952 Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (1910-1989), the director of the "Good Design" program that was coorganized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, requested that the collection be considered for the annual exhibition of "the best modern design in home furnishing available to the American public," but unfortunately it failed to arrive in time for the selection committee meeting. (5) However, a patio setting that included a chaise longue and cocktail table from the line was included in the Art in Interiors exhibition at the Midtown Galleries in New York City in 1952 and was illustrated in the New York Times at that time (Fig. 2). (6) The furniture's honest construction, absence of superficial ornamentation, and extreme sculptural quality undoubtedly appealed to those interested in modern design, who would have recognized its formalistic similarities to works by Nelson, Florence Knoll, Jens Risom, and Pierre Jeanneret. (7)

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Since the early 1950s, serious interest in the furniture was more or less dormant until last December, when a chaise longue from the line (see Pl. II) invited multiple bids at a Sotheby's auction in New York City and sold for $13,200--more than one hundred times its original list price of $115. (8) Connoisseurs today champion the furniture for its synthesis of the craft tradition with modern design values and for the adaptive use of farm parts--plow handles (see Fig. 7) for furniture legs (see Pls. III, VI) and felloes, or wheel segments, for stool seats (see Pl. XII). The beauty of Stone's furniture, explains Andy Hackman of California Living, a shop in Los Angeles, is that it was disciplined by its common, seemingly innocuous, materials.

Connoisseurs are also intrigued by the fact that the furniture was designed by Stone, a mid-twentieth-century architect whose prolific, yet controversial, work spans the globe from Fayetteville to Islamabad, Pakistan. (9) "There is something I really want to love about this remarkably polarizing figure," said James Zemaitis, director of twentieth-century design at Sotheby's in New York City, who was first captivated by Stone's furniture in 2001 when the chaise longue in Plate II was on the block at the Phillips auction house in New York City. (10)

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Stone has always elicited such passionate responses, largely because of his daring attempts to break away from accepted traditions. One of the earliest American architects to absorb the international style, (11) he defied the strictures of modernism (as defined by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr. in 1932) (12) by creating such monumental buildings as the United States Embassy in New Delhi (1959), which was embellished with lavish materials and rich ornament and included the perforated wall, or grille, that became his signature (see Fig. 2). Time stated in a cover story about Stone that he was "one of the profession's freest spirits and by general consensus the most versatile designer and draftsman of his generation." (13)

Also of great interest in the development of the furniture is the role played by Fulbright, a Democratic senator from Arkansas, especially because at the time he was focused on such critical issues as the Korean War, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation scandals, and the rapid spread of McCarthyism. (14) As president of the J. H. Phipps Lumber Company (1898-1954), one of a number of enterprises acquired by his father, Jay Fulbright (1866-1923), the senator was determined to find a profitable product for the business. (15) At its peak, Phipps Lumber is said to have been the largest industrial concern in northwestern Arkansas, with more than two hundred employees making wagon and plow stock--axles, bolsters, eveners, hounds, neck yokes, reaches, rims, sandboards, spokes, and single- and doubletrees, as well as felloes and plow handles. (16) But as mechanization took over, Stone later reminisced, "the romance of our boyhood days was over and the horse-drawn vehicle finished." (17)