Every so often, the Terra Museum of American Art hosts an exhibition of something other than paintings, sculptures, prints or drawings.
It doesn’t happen with frequency, but when it happens at all, it invariably seems a Great Step Forward, as indeed it is, given the conservativism regarding media, styles and periods that continues to guide the museum.
This time the Terra welcomes its first crafts exhibition, which serves as an addendum to the many shows throughout the country during 1993, the Year of American Craft.
The show is, however, more than that, being the traveling version of a survey of the Arts and Crafts Movement in America, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1990.
The original exhibition was quite an event. It celebrated the acquisition by the museum of one of the most distinguished collections on the Arts and Crafts period, holdings of more than 200 pieces of furniture and decorative objects assembled by Max Palevsky and Jodie Evans, with the guidance of L.A. curator Leslie Greene Bowman.
In that collection alone, you could trace the achievements of all the most significant Americans within the movement, as well as European precursors who exerted direct or indirect influence.
The show at the Terra includes 100 superb objects by such masters as Gustav Stickley, Greene and Greene, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Frank Lloyd Wright. But the European antecedents are gone, and unless one reads the text panels, the viewer might take the movement as an American phenomenon.
The exhibition also would benefit from the juxtaposition of European and American pieces insofar as it often would illustrate the straightforwardness of American design as compared with European artifice and sophistication.
The plainness that openly revealed the construction of Arts and Crafts furniture was an American hallmark perhaps growing from a Puritan heritage. At any rate, it gave the sense of virtue highlighted by the exhibition’s title.
Such virtue-that is to say, cleanness and directness-would dominate American design for half a century, conveying the very essence of what was newest, purest and most modern.
However, only Arts and Crafts furniture has it. The same qualities are not in the glasswork, metalwork and pottery. Their ideas of beauty are older, more picturesque, elaborate rather than reduced or streamlined.
Unlike the larger “Ideal Home” exhibition mounted by New York’s American Crafts Museum, this show has no textiles, and you really don’t miss them, though to be complete, fiberwork should have been included.
The Terra installation groups objects effectively, adding appropriate paintings from the permanent collection; and if all the settings are spare, they nonetheless give some idea of how the works would function in actual interiors of the period.
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“American Arts & Crafts: Virtue in Design” continues at the Terra Museum of American Art, 666 N. Michigan Ave., through March 20. Judith Barter, curator of American arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, will speak about objects in the show at 6 p.m. Tuesday. Admission is $6.
