"A New and Native Beauty": Arts & Crafts Masters Greene & Greene Return to Boston

The Gamble House, Pasadena, CA, designed by Greene and Greene, 1908.

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In the age of DIY, Etsy, and green architecture, the British-born Arts and Crafts movement should enjoy a new renown. The movement emphasized hand craftsmanship and "honest materials," especially local materials, and disdained the mechanized products of the Industrial Revolution as dehumanizing. The movement made inviting living spaces, plain but comfortable furniture, and espoused a Romantic balance between the manmade and the natural. In the early years of the 20th century, Charles and Henry Greene developed a uniquely American derivation of the style.

If you haven't heard of Greene & Greene, don't worry; you're not alone. Unlike, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene & Greene hasn't become a household name, especially on the East Coast. But the comparison is apt. Museum of Fine Arts curator Nonnie Gadsden says that "Greene & Greene were to California architecture what Frank Lloyd Wright was to the Midwest."

And Gadsden should know. She's the coordinating curator for the Boston stop of A "New and Native" Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene and Greene, which opened Tuesday in the Torf Gallery at the MFA.

Historians know Greene & Greene as major American inheritors of the Arts and Crafts movement. They designed "ultimate bungalows" for wealthy patrons in Southern California, "total living environments" that brought the beauty of nature into the manmade realm of the home. The brothers designed their bungalows in painstaking detail, but they also designed all the furniture, metalwork, and stained glass to go along with their buildings. And, as early 20th century architecture goes, it was astonishingly modern.

Greene & Greene were influenced by Japanese art and architecture as much as they were by the Arts and Crafts movement, and the MFA's exhibition makes the case that it was Boston where they became interested in both. The brothers were born and raised in the Midwest but went to architecture school at MIT, which was located in Boston's Back Bay during the late 19th century, right down the street from the original MFA building in Copley Square. Boston was the American hotbed of Arts and Crafts, the home of the Society of Arts and Crafts Boston, the first American exhibition of the movement's work, and, of course, Henry Hobson Richardson's Arts and Crafts cathedral, the Trinity Church in Copley Square.

At the same time, the MFA was collecting the first collection of Japanese art in the United States, and its displays of paintings, pottery, and weaponry had a wide public appeal. It was at MIT and local Boston architecture firms where the Greenes did their journeyman work, and it was at the MFA where they first encountered objects like Japanese tsubas, or sword guards, which found a prominent place in their visual vocabulary.

To highlight these connections, the MFA exhibit begins with a examples of Arts and Crafts furniture and a stunning display of Japanese pottery and tsubas from the MFA collection. The Japanese objects are displayed without regard to modern curatorial practice—just the way the Greenes would have seen them in their lifetime. To complete the tableau: a 1911 painting of Copley Square, showing what the area would have looked like when the Greenes were at MIT. It's an inspired move that gives local relevance to this traveling exhibition.

But don't worry. If you begin to forget that the Greenes worked in California, there's a ceramic living room table lamp from the Tichenor house decorated with Yin and Yang and hexagrams from the I Ching. Just like a surfer dude's leg.