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 evoking industrial design. The case study is the artistic production of the family firm and workshop of Wilhelm A. Kuyken Jr. whose core business was in roller prints for wallpapers and textiles. The firm was established in the Netherlands in 1904 and continued in Belgium in 1923. With the move of location, artistic production shifted from decorative panels in proto-Art Deco fashion manufactured in a reinterpreted artisan cloisonné technique around 1920, to chromed tubular metal furniture with wooden compartments representative of Western modernist industrial furniture design in the 1930s. Using documents and works from private family archives, the artifacts and production processes in the Netherlands and those in Belgium are linked and related to the look of materials and the debate about wood and metal in modernist furniture design.