Embroidery and Enterprise in Gilded Age America

Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900. Curated by Amelia Peck and Research Assistant Carol Irish, Department of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. October 10, 2001-January 6, 2002.

Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900. By Amelia Peck and Carol Irish. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001). 276 pages. $45.00 (cloth).

Perhaps the real achievement of the impressive exhibition, Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900, is that it was actually produced. The two subjects, a woman entrepreneur and her textile designs, have not been the traditional fare of prestigious art museums. Amelia Peck, the project's curator and co-author of the catalog, remarks upon the place of textiles within the museum world: they are marginalized, "not considered valid art." ¹ There is a hierarchy of scholarly "seriousness" in material culture as well. The decorative arts stand below painting. Within the decorative arts, furniture stands higher than textiles. Textiles, unless they are tapestries done by male artisans, have been of minimal interest historically.

These drawbacks did not deter the Metropolitan Museum of Art from considering a show on Candace Wheeler (1827-1923) as early as 1967 (fig. 1). It was at this time that the Met began to expand its interpretation of the American decorative arts beyond the hallowed Colonial and Federal eras. The innovative Marilyn Johnson, then a research fellow, called attention to a collection of twenty-seven pieces of Wheeler's textiles, donated in 1928 by Wheeler's daughter, Dora. The idea slumbered until 1997 when an exhibition devoted solely to the artist was proposed and finally approved. Credit goes to Met Director Philippe de Montebello, Chairman of The American Wing Morrison H. Heckscher, and to the two curators, Amelia Peck and Carol Irish, for pushing the project to its conclusion. Research was conducted fitfully for about six years, with the most intensive work being in the final three years. The result was both an exhibition that gathered together a wide range of items and a catalogue with much detailed information about the items displayed. Impressive, too, are the textual background and biographical information about this remarkable nineteenth-century designer and her artistic milieu.

Candace Wheeler's life spanned the rapidly changing kaleidoscope of the American scene for nearly a century, from her childhood in an upstate Puritan-like setting in the 1830s to her death in jazz-age New York in 1923. ² Her life and achievements encapsulated the perils and possibilities for those gifted women in late nineteenth-century America who ventured on a "modern" course in their lifetime. It was refreshing that the curators had chosen not to follow the usual historiography of the many women involved in the decorative arts "craze" during the Gilded Age. Traditionally women in embroidery and textile design have been designated as part of the unmoving tableaux of Victorian housewives involved in domestic leisure pastimes and genteel non-profit activities. This was not the case for many women, especially those, like Wheeler, who engaged in the public marketplace of commerce and were outspoken advocates for a new cultural ideal that moved art to the center of American society. Congratulations to Peck and Irish for labeling this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue as a story, not only of the remarkable Candace Wheeler, but also of "The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900." They see Wheeler as part of the larger story of women's involvement in the saga of American cultural history as well as an important voice in the development of American art and design.

This exhibit is proof that historians need to rethink the narrative of the nineteenth-century women artist/entrepreneurs in addition to reconsidering the priorities that make decorative arts an adjunct to so-called "serious" art in the last part of the nineteenth...