Materials, Artistic Craftwork, and Modernist Furniture Design:The Kuyken Firm in the Netherlands and Belgium 1918–1940

Historians tend to posit crafts and design as separate worlds, with crafts being handmade artifacts produced in limited numbers as studio practice, and design encompassing industrially manufactured “products” in large quantities. This polarization, as many have argued, appears problematic. The present article offers a case study to illustrate how manufacturing processes blurred connotations of materials and decoration and categorizations of modes of manufacturing during the years 1918 to 1940, when rhetoric regarding modernist design challenged existing handicrafts through shapes and materials... Mehr ...