Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900 (review)

To date, Candace Wheeler has been a somewhat insubstantial presence hovering over the changes in American design thinking during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, influencing much that went on but failing to emerge as flesh and blood. While we know she designed textiles, worked with Louis Comfort Tiffany, encouraged women to establish professional careers as homeworkers in the artistic industries, and created the interior of the Women's Building at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, the absence of a full account of her life and work has made it hard to piece these fragments into a coherent whole. Now, with the arrival of Amelia Peck and Carol Irish's book, accompanied by their extensive catalog entries for the artifacts featured in an exhibition of Wheeler's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001-2002, a credible persona has emerged for the first time.

It is not entirely surprising that it has taken so long. In order to reveal Wheeler in her full glory Peck and Irish have clearly had to be rigorous researchers, refusing to believe all that she said about her own life, scouring numerous historical texts and archives, talking to family members, and looking at family memorabilia in an effort to ensure that their account is as accurate and complete as possible. A complex character has emerged, and—as is so often the case in accounts of creative women—Wheeler's significance is shown to lie less in her own material achievements (which exist in abundance) and more in her encouragement of others and in her orchestration of other peoples' lives and creative activities. She is deemed important, for example, for overseeing the textile workshops of Tiffany's decorating firm rather than for designing the interiors herself, and in establishing the artistic careers of her daughter, Dora, and her friend, Rosina Emmet. As the authors explain, she "opened the field of American design to women" (p. 80).

This book follows in a tradition of feminist writing about design. Early "hidden from history" accounts of such seminal figures as Eileen Gray and Charlotte Perriand have now been fully integrated into mainstream design history. They were closely followed by works that successfully repositioned the wives and female companions of leading male modernist architects and designers as active participants. This book belongs to the third wave of feminist writing on design, which focuses on women who operated within the private world of domesticity. As such, Wheeler was not particularly engaged in the many advances in technology that affected her historical period. Her influence belonged, rather, to the world of domestic manufacture typified in the nineteenth century by the hand production of textiles, embroidery in particular, and the craft-based disciplines of ceramics, enamel work, and jewelry.

Heavily influenced by the ethical and social preoccupations of William Morris and the other Arts and Crafts protagonists (she based the Society of Decorative Artists, which she formed as an organization to sell women's domestic artwork, on Britain's Royal School of Art Needlework), Wheeler never moved beyond hand manufacture. In the years after 1900, when she had retired from the board of the Association of Artists—her own interior decorating company—she was clearly out of tune with new developments in household technology that would transform women's domestic lives beyond all recognition. Her life was lived out in the context of the nineteenth-century shift from rural to urban, which meant that middle-class women became economically dependent on their husbands for the first time. All her energies were dedicated to efforts to give women back some independence in the domestic sphere.

This is an impressive, well-researched book, which seeks, first and foremost, to tell us more about this shadowy figure and to bring her to life. In so doing, however, it also succeeds...