Furniture: a Concise History

Fülszöveg

THE WORLD OF ART
Furniture
a Concise History Edward Lucie-Smith 190 plates, 20 in colour
Nowadays people expect to go into a shop, pick up a chair, take it home, hammer it together, and sit in it the same night. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, one piece of furniture might take a year to produce. Throughout his history of furniture, Edward Lucie-Smith has kept in focus the way in which people's lives, their self-images and preoccupations, as well as the organization and techniques of furniture-making, have affected the forms of these objects which are so vitai a part of our visual world. Accordingly, both text and illustrations treat furniture not as a succession of collectors' pieces, but as a statement about the society that created it, ranging from the ceremóniái chairs of Egypt in the thirteenth century BC to the curious chairs in animal form designed in our own day by Wendell Castle.
While somé furniture-types last only a few decades, others recur at intervals... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THE WORLD OF ART
Furniture
a Concise History Edward Lucie-Smith 190 plates, 20 in colour
Nowadays people expect to go into a shop, pick up a chair, take it home, hammer it together, and sit in it the same night. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, one piece of furniture might take a year to produce. Throughout his history of furniture, Edward Lucie-Smith has kept in focus the way in which people's lives, their self-images and preoccupations, as well as the organization and techniques of furniture-making, have affected the forms of these objects which are so vitai a part of our visual world. Accordingly, both text and illustrations treat furniture not as a succession of collectors' pieces, but as a statement about the society that created it, ranging from the ceremóniái chairs of Egypt in the thirteenth century BC to the curious chairs in animal form designed in our own day by Wendell Castle.
While somé furniture-types last only a few decades, others recur at intervals throughout history. Built-in furniture was used in Neolithic times and was revived in the Middle Ages, and a few years ago the story seemed to be comíng full circle, with the 1960s conversation pit as a symptom of the unifications of architecture and furniture into one featureless whole. Yet conflicting trends are now emerging: a new concern with well-made, elegant furniture was inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and is exemplified today by Makepeace's designs, and the Modern
Movement has taught us to look more closely at forms, with the result that present-
t
day furniture-makers have a very different challenge to face: that of sculpture.
Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 in Kingston, Jamaica, and came to England in 1946. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Merton College, Oxford, where he took a degree in History. He is currently the art critic of the London Evening Standard and alsó writes for the lllustrated London News, in additibn to being well known as an author and broadcaster. He has written four previous volumes in the 'World of Art Library': Eroticism in Western Art, A Concise History of French Painting, Symbolist Art and Late Modern: The Visual Arts since 1945. Other books include four volumes of poetry, several anthologies - among them The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse and British Poetry since 1945 - a historicál növel, a biography of Joan of Arc and a history of piracy. Vissza