Modern Design 
21 September 2023
Modern Design 
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Wharton Esherick

Important vanity for Marjorie Content

USA, 1932
padouk, mirrored and clear glass 83½ h × 44 w × 16¼ d in (212 × 112 × 41 cm)
estimate: $40,000–50,000
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Marjorie Content was a formalist photographer active within modernist social and artistic circles in New York in the 1930s.
Vanity features six hidden compartments to each side: four concealing open storage, four concealing one fixed shelf each, two concealing lighting, and two concealing pegs for hanging jewelry. Carved signature and date to two compartments ‘J.S. + Wharton Esherick MCMXXXII’.
provenance: Commissioned directly from the artist by Marjorie Content | Thence by descent | Private Collection
exhibited: Daring Design: The Impact of Three Women on Wharton Esherick's Craft, 10 September 2021 - 6 February 2022, Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA
literature: Wharton Esherick: The Journey of a Creative Mind, Bascom, pg. 125 illustrates this example in situ

This work will ship from Lambertville, New Jersey.

This item is subject to CITES regulations. Rago Wright LLC. cannot provide the required documentation needed for export out of the United States; therefore, this item is only eligible for domestic shipping.
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Furniture as Sculpture

An Important Vanity by Wharton Esherick

Wharton Esherick’s Content Bedroom Suite in New York City Apartment, photograph by Marjorie Content, c. 1933. Photo courtesy of the Wharton Esherick Museum.

In 1932, impressed by the artistic qualities of Wharton's pieces for Mrs. Fischer, Marjorie Content, the photographer the Eshericks had met through Henry Varnum Poor, asked Wharton to furnish her bedroom in the brownstone her financier father had given her on West Tenth Street in New York. The opportunity allowed Wharton to continue his experiments in expressionism, to make furniture as sculpture. He worked from May 1932 to March 1933 on this project...

Wharton finished the room with a floor-to-ceiling dressing table, built of triangular shapes and fit between two windows. The mirror, wide at the floor and narrowing almost to a point at the top, is flanked by inverted trylons, their inner faces mirrored. Their outer faces are made from a single board of beautifully grained padouk. Barely visible in the outer faces are the horizontal cuts defining the four doors to compartments for cosmetics, combs, and brushes. In the patch of ceiling between the trylons, he recessed a light. The dressing table is a single, thick piece of plate glass spanning from trylon to trylon.

 
Excerpted from page 126 of Mansfield Bascom's book, Wharton Esherick: The Journey of a Creative Mind. For more on Marjorie Content's bedroom suite, see the Wharton Esherick Museum's blog post on the subject.

Wharton had passed beyond just thinking or feeling or talking art; he was as much a part of what we call “art” as art was a part of him, like the trees that grow around this hilltop—naturally, un-self-consciously.

George Rochberg, friend of the artist

Wharton Esherick 1887–1970

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Wharton Esherick was an American artist and craftsman whose influence on craft furniture design and architectural forms spanned decades. Esherick pioneered the Postwar American Studio Craft movement applying a technique that bridged the gap between expressionist art and craft. His furniture was non-traditional: both sculptural and functional while focused on organic, asymmetric forms. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Esherick studied wood and metal working at Central Manual Training High School and later drawing and printmaking at the Pennsylvania Museum School of the Industrial Arts. In 1908 he received a painting scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but did not complete the program, instead he pursued commercial art and book illustration while continuing to paint on the side.

In the early 1920s, he moved to rural Paoli, Pennsylvania in order to live a lifestyle more immersed in nature. At this time his woodworking began to take form combining modern art with hand wood shaping creating frames for his paintings which developed into carved woodcuts. By 1926 his sculpture was exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York, and he began to hand-build a studio on his land, which in 1993 was named a National Historic Landmark and opened to the public as the Wharton Esherick Museum.

Esherick’s work was featured in three World’s Fairs, and in 1958 he was honored by a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in New York as well as awarded the Gold Medal for Craftsmanship from the American Institute of Architects in 1971. His work has been exhibited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Smithsonian Institution, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York among many others.

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