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The new museum is a calm and elegant presence on 53rd Street. Fox and Fowle, the New York City architectural firm, has created an airy space within Architect Kevin Roche's Hutton tower. Although the museum's facade is faced with the same pinkish granite as the tower, it is free of Roche's flamboyant touches -- mansard roof and lobby fit for the enthronement of pharaohs.
Inside the museum, pale maple floors, terra-cotta tile and fiber matting create a neutral background for the displays. What saves it from being merely one more ocean of architectural white space is a soaring four-story atrium- lobby, dominated by a magnificent oval staircase that leads to the exhibit levels. "What we wanted," says Smith, "was a simple environment that would be a good backdrop for our exhibits."
Although one might expect a craft museum to be a kind of citified log cabin with rough walls and hand-hewn doors, the touches here are smooth and understated. With the exception of Furnituremaker James Schriber, creator of the austere maple reception desk, craftsmen were not invited to contribute because, officials felt, their ornamentation might detract from the objects on view. The very presence of the museum, however, adds fuel to a long- standing argument. Its large plate-glass windows offer a tantalizing glimpse of the Museum of Modern Art's new west wing across the street. What is craft and what is art, the view asks, and what belongs in which museum?
Such questions are intensified by the diversity of "Poetry of the Physical." "What is American about this show," says Smith, "is that there is no identifiable national style." Once craft was considered a handmaiden of art. Artisans made useful or decorative objects to enhance daily life. For American pioneers, making tools and furnishings was a necessity. But the 20th century widened horizons by elevating the craftsman's role. The Bauhaus influence in America allowed the artisan to become a partner of the architect. Later, the abstract expressionist movement in painting and sculpture, with its emphasis on individual statement, swept through woodshops and pottery studios as well as painters' ateliers. The show's organization is a declaration that craft has moved beyond the strictures of the useful and even the decorative. Its four divisions are the Object as Statement, the Object Made for Use, the Object as Vessel and the Object for Personal Adornment.
The latest examples of the utile are handsomely represented. The dark, roughtextured pottery of Karen Karnes is a reminder of why crafts appealed so deeply and directly in the antitech 1960s. An outsize salad bowl, meticulously turned from a single chunk of California black walnut by Bob Stocksdale, is notable for its revelation of the wood's grain. A fiddleback, hard-rock-maple- and-ebony rocking chair, a fortunate meeting of Copenhagen and Big Sur by California Master Craftsman Sam Maloof, invites the viewer to experience the best of contemporary artifacts while sitting down in comfort. Maloof, 70, bristles at new developments. Younger artisans, he said during a pre-opening tour of the museum, "don't seem to have any ideas. They work over a piece for two or three years, and they work the soul right out of it." Replied Potter Karnes, who was standing nearby: "Oh, Sam, they don't even use words like soul."