Wendell Castle

Stool Sculpture is a piece of the true cross: a precious relic of Wendell Castle’s first artistic breakthrough. No object that he made in the course of his seven-decade career, indeed, no work made in the whole postwar American craft movement, is more historically significant.

To set the scene: the year was 1959, and Castle was still at the University of Kansas, studying sculpture. He’d been making furniture in his studio for his own use, which drew the ire of one of his instructors – this was meant to be a sculpture program, after all. Castle was enough of a contrarian that he got to wondering: What if I did both furniture and sculpture, and at the same time? Stool Sculpture was the result. Though it is an entirely successful abstract composition, you can also imagine perching on it, hooking your heels over the footrest.

Made of salvaged gunstock blanks from a local armory and originally inlaid with ivory (since replaced with a substitute material), Stool Sculpture is a delicate and refined object. Yet what power it holds: even in its title, it captures the collision of two categories that, at the time, were held rigidly separate. And what happens when two things collide, approaching one another across a distance? Everything ends up in a new, more complicated, more exciting configuration. As Castle put it many years later, “This was [when] those hybrid things didn't exist like they do now. They’re all over the place.”¹ This is exactly right: Stool Sculpture instantly positioned Castle within a small avant garde of artists, whose experiments would thoroughly reshape the possibilities for craft mediums. (Among them was Peter Voulkos, whose own breakthrough works were unfolding exactly at the same moment out in California.) 

So novel was Castle’s innovation that it took him some time to grasp its implications. Stool Sculpture itself had a positive reception across disciplines: it immediately won a prize at a Kansas “Designer-Craftsman” annual show, and in 1960, was juried into an art exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. Castle did follow up with related works, too, notably the similarly proportioned Scribe’s Stool (1961-62). But it was not until he began using stack lamination – allowing him to work subtractively, a totally different process – that he would fully realize the sculptural possibilities he had unleashed. He would ultimately follow those prospects farther, and longer, than even he could have possibly dreamt. But it all started here.

[1] Oral history interview with Wendell Castle, June 3 and December 12, 1981. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

GLENN ADAMSON