Wendell Castle

Medici-Berenson Gallery, Bay Harbor Island, Florida
Edward and Mila Minskoff, New York, 1982
Private Collection, California
R & Company, New York, 2014
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2019

Michael A. Stone, Contemporary American Woodworkers, Salt Lake City, 1986, p. 122
Davira S. Taragin, Edward S. Cooke, Jr. and Joseph Giovannini, Furniture by Wendell Castle, New York, 1989, p. 56
Patricia Conway, Art for Everyday: The New Craft Movement, New York, 1990, p. 256
Emily Evans Eerdmans, Wendell Castle: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958-2012, New York, 2014, p. 231, fig. III.386

Illusions, Carl Solway Gallery, New York, May 9–June 3, 1978
Woodworks: New American Sculpture, Dayton Art Institute, October 21, 1980–February 1, 1981
Woodshow, Medici-Berenson Gallery, Bay Harbor Island, Florida, November 12-December 8, 1981
Furniture by Wendell Castle, Detroit Institute of Arts, December 5, 1989 – February 4, 1990

Wendell Castle was full of surprises. No sooner had he settled into a way of working – generally having invented it himself – than he would swerve toward a new idea, a new challenge. Perhaps the most striking instance of this dynamic was his unexpected exploration of trompe l’oeil illusionism, first unveiled in 1978. These pieces were at the opposite end of the spectrum, conceptually, from the carved wood and molded plastic furniture that Castle had been making over the preceding years. Those freeform abstractions had been completely liberated from traditional typologies and joinery methods. The illusionistic pieces, by contrast, are precise imitations of pre-existing forms – “normal” furniture – with the uncanny addition of everyday objects like coats, hats, and keys, all carved in the same wood.

The astonishing verisimilitude that Castle achieved in these pieces, with the help of a specialist carver from France, fit into a broader tendency in the arts at the time – Super-Realism in painting and sculpture, the still life ceramics of Richard Shaw and Marilyn Levine. Some works in this direction were little more than technical showpieces (an example in wood-carving, admittedly astonishing, is the work of Fumio Yoshimura). The best, however, deployed mimesis to provocative effect, and this is certainly true of Castle’s trompe l’oeil works. They plumb the latent strangeness of domesticity, the subjective, person-like quality of the chairs we sit on, the garments we wear. (A writer for Craft Horizons perceptively observed that in this respect they are actually natural counterparts to Castle’s freeform work: “the two phases can be construed as representing the two poles of surrealism—the biomorphic and the illusionistic.”)¹

The illusionistic works also offer an understated meditation on time, capturing for all time a moment of transience – here, a coat left casually on a chair’s shoulder. This line of thinking would culminate, ultimately, in Castle’s Ghost Clock, the beloved centerpiece of the Renwick Gallery. Here, in this preternaturally still object, we see the idea unexpectedly launched into flight.

[1] Sally Eauclaire, “Wendell Castle: Wood, Form, and Space,” Craft Horizons 38/8 (November/December 1978), 63.

GLENN ADAMSON