Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509080128
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RITA REIF THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The best of the 20 pieces of furniture shown were three painted chests for blankets and a clock, each profusely decorated with birds, flowers, hearts, scrolls, stars, pinwheels or diamonds.
At the time, no one knew the name of the artist who had painted the images on the chests and clocks, but there were clues: several bore the letters ``JSP,'' and every piece was embellished with boldly graphic motifs that looked like exploded versions of the watercolor images on frakturs, the birth and baptismal certificates of the Pennsylvania Germans and their relatives in Virginia.
The Rosetta Stone of this painted furniture was a tall case clock, discovered a year after the show had closed by Donald R. Walters, the folk-art curator who had organized the exhibition. He was continuing his pursuit of JSP's identity when, he said, ``I got lucky.''
Walters went to the Shenandoah Valley, where most of the pieces in the show and many others had turned up, to check the records of local families in a public library. There, he came across the genealogy of a Johannes Spitler (read just the letters J. Sp.), a farmer born in 1774 in Shenandoah who died in Ohio in 1837. The last surname in that Spitler family history was Modisett, and one was listed in the telephone book.
Walters called, and was invited to visit. There, he found a clock, dated 1801, with the names of two men prominently inscribed on the front: Jacob Strickler, a Mennonite minister and fraktur artist, and Johannes Spitler, a furniture decorator.
Strickler and Spitler, who lived on adjoining farms and were related, also shared an esthetic bond revealed in the clock and in the frakturs found at that house: the sides were painted with a dazzling zigzag pattern, and above that were plants with roots shaped like upside-down hearts, motifs also found in Strickler's frakturs.
That visit eventually netted Williamsburg eight Strickler frakturs, which are as rare as Spitler furniture. By the time the clock was up for sale, Williamsburg had bought a more traditional Spitler clock, and decided not to acquire a second one.
Because he had discovered it, Walters was allowed to buy the clock, which he did just before he left Williamsburg in 1978 to become a folk-art dealer. (He now divides his time between Goshen, Ind., and Northampton, Mass.)
Walters sold the clock in 1986 at Sotheby's in New York for $203,500, a record for American painted furniture.
That record was finally eclipsed in May, when the most exuberantly decorated Spitler piece, a blanket chest, was auctioned by Sotheby's in Charlottesville, Va., for $343,500. Spitler had pulled out all the stops on this one, painting the top with stars and the front with scrolls, pinwheels, candy canes and diamonds.
``The chest is as expressive of American society of that time as any Newport desk,'' said Graham Hood, the chief curator of Williamsburg, which bought it. ``It's a great piece of furniture.''
Two decades after the Williamsburg exhibition, Hood said, much has changed: ``We've experienced a tremendous growth in awareness of the genuineness of vernacular forms.''
As Williamsburg continues to seek high-style and folk art, he said, it follows the lead of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who collected both. Her folk art became the foundation of Williamsburg's collection, while her Matisses and Cezannes went to the Museum of Modern Art, of which she was a founder.
Today, most prize Spitler pieces are owned by - or promised to - either Williamsburg or the Museum of American Folk Art in New York.
Williamsburg owns three pieces, a clock and two blanket chests, and in 1986 Ralph Esmerian, the president of the folk art museum, acquired the clock that helped identify Spitler.
Esmerian owns the largest number of Spitler pieces: four. And these works - in addition to the clock, a corner cupboard, a miniature chest and the mate to the whimsically decorated blanket chest auctioned in May - are all promised gifts to the folk art museum.
Tradition has it that the two chests were made for sisters who lived in houses next to each other on a farm in Virginia.
``When you discover works you like by an artist who has not been identified,'' Esmerian said, ``you're desperate to find out the name. But in the end, you really don't care about the name. What grabs you is the power of the design. That's what stays with you even when you realize the shortcomings of how these pieces were made.''
He compares the construction of the clock case to a coffin, and says that the other pieces are as rudimentary. Indeed, Spitler furniture is the sparest of the spare, put together with plain pine boards and bracket feet and a minimum of detailing. The art is in the paint.
Will there be another museum exhibition of Spitler furniture?
``No question about it,'' said Gerard C. Wertkin, the director of the folk art museum. ``Since we will ultimately own four wonderful pieces, it will be important for us to exhibit them - and all the rest, if that's possible. No date has been set, but we're certainly speaking about a show this side of the millennium.''
by CNB