Have you ever wondered about the materials and techniques used by ancient
furniture makers? Or considered how furniture was depicted visually in
early modern Europe? A long-awaited anthology with many Bard Graduate
Center connections answers these questions.
A Cultural History of Furniture, published in six volumes (Bloomsbury, 2022)
and recently added to the shelves of the BGC Library, follows the rich and
diverse traditions of furniture design, manufacture, and use in Western
Europe and its colonies over a 4,500-year period. Its ambitious scope
required contributions from seventy experts in fields ranging from decorative arts, design, and material culture, to archaeology, history, and art history. Its general editor, Christina M. Anderson—a research fellow at BGC in
fall 2016—tapped professors Jeffrey Collins and Deborah L. Krohn, and professor emerita Elizabeth Simpson, to assist.
Treating furniture as an artifact deeply embedded in its cultural contexts,
the anthology investigates how diverse social, religious, political, economic,
and aesthetic factors shaped furniture’s production, circulation, and
reception over time. It explores shifting definitions and understandings of
furniture across a range of eras and places, as well as changes in forms, styles,
materials, and methods of manufacture, going beyond existing art historical
studies to explore how furnishings functioned in and across cultural contexts.
The anthology’s authors combine object-centered case studies with a
careful reading of primary sources to shine new light on furniture’s social
and cultural significance. Simpson coauthored two chapters in volume one,
A Cultural History of Furniture in Antiquity: a chapter on Design and Motifs with Geoffrey Killen, and a chapter on Types and Uses with Killen and Stephan T.A.M Mols.
Krohn explored the many ways that furniture
was described or represented verbally in her chapter for volume three,
The Age of Exploration. “My aim,” she explained, “was to use the ‘paper trail’
in inventories, cookbooks, plays, and poems to help get at the ways furniture was experienced, imagined, and recorded. Although my focus was on
Italy and England, I’m convinced that similar dynamics involving gender
differences, the cultivation of privacy, and the organization of the household played out across Western Europe.”
Collins’s chapter for the same volume considers the diverse media and
settings in which furniture was represented visually in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. From design drafts, project drawings, and pattern
books intended largely for makers, to engravings, tapestries, and paintings
targeted to consumers, this broad graphic repertoire suggests how images
of furniture circulated in early modern Europe and what values they communicated to their audiences.
His second chapter on furniture in the public setting for volume four,
The Age of Enlightenment, proved more challenging due to limited survivals
and a paucity of existing scholarship. “Even defining what ‘public’ furniture
meant was not immediately obvious,” Collins explained, “which spurred
me to think about the period and its material traces in a new way.” His
chapter investigates a wide range of non-domestic sites including schools,
government buildings, churches, synagogues, taverns, and social clubs,
highlighting the key role furniture played in creating but also conditioning
the emerging spaces of public sociability.
Krohn and Collins plan to use the volumes in teaching and are proud
to have brought a BGC perspective to the project. They hope
A Cultural
History of Furniture will help students, curators, and professors mobilize
object-based research in search of a broader historical synthesis. The series,
and the many contributions from Bard Graduate Center faculty, underscore
how artifacts of all kinds can be studied as primary evidence of the social
and cultural practices of the past.
