Drop-leaf+Dining+Table+with+Wood+Hinges

Date: 1975
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/2001/2001.82A-I_1a.jpg?itok=P5v-nUTa width="423" height="295" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/drop-leaf-dining-table-with-wood-hinges-71314"]] || Title: **Drop-leaf Dining Table with Wood Hinges**

Artist: **Sam Maloof** Born: Chino, California 1916 Died: Rancho Cucamonga, California 2009

Medium: Brazilian rosewood Dimensions: 28 x 44 1/4 x 110 in. (71.1 x 112.4 x 279.4 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Blanche Pope in memory of Edker Pope

Accession: 2001.82A || Self-taught wood-worker. Classic, simple designs that blend beauty with utility.. Believes successful piece of furniture contains something of the eye, hand and heart. Ergonomic spindle that mimics spine’s natural curve. In 1973, Blanche and Edker Pope visited Maloof’s home and ordered rosewood rocking chair. Later that evening, they phoned Maloof and ordered entire household of rosewood furniture. One year later, Maloof shipped 43 pieces to their Corona del Mar seaside residence. He was allergic to the fine dust rosewood produced. (Source: The Furniture of Sam Maloof.) - [Source: Notes from Curator-led Walk-Throughs in the Gallery and various Catalogs]
 * Additional Information: **

"There’s a lot of work being done today that doesn’t have any soul in it. The technique may be the utmost perfection, yet it is lifeless. It doesn’t have a soul. I hope my furniture has a soul to it."
 * Artist's Statement: **

on design: "Good furniture must convey a feeling of function but also must be appealing to the eye. I never make conversation piece furniture... [and since] I'm not subject to the manufacturing syndrome; I don't have to change for the sake of change. I just keep on improving."

on woodworking: "The smell of wood in my shop is more pleasing than a desk in an office."

on craft: "We marvel and exclaim about the machine, and yet nothing has been designed or made, nor ever will be, as wondrous as the hands of man. What it produces has no element of surprise or feeling that an object made by hand may have. It leaves no room for change."

Born in Chino, California, Sam Maloof is a 1934 graduate of Chino High School. He worked as a graphic artist before being encouraged by his wife to pursue woodworking. Having no formal training in the field, he persevered through trial and error to become one of America's preeminent makers of handcrafted furniture.
 * Biographical Information: **

Maloof was the first woodworker elected as a fellow of the American Craft Council and the first recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1985. Once of his rocking chairs—regarded by many craft artists as the most difficult type of furntiure to make—was the first piece of contemporary furniture selected for the White House Collection in 1982.

// Sam Maloof, Furniture Craftsman, Dies at 93 // By WILLIAM GRIMES Published: May 27, 2009

Sam Maloof, whose simple, elegant wooden furniture, which he designed and made by hand, made him a central figure in the postwar American crafts movement, died at his home in Alta Loma, Calif., on Thursday. He was 93.

The death was confirmed by Roslyn Bock, the business manager of Sam Maloof Woodworking.

Mr. Maloof, who was self-taught, developed a distinctive design aesthetic that blended traditional and modern styles in functional furniture; its sleek, curving, gently sculptural forms made him highly sought after by private clients and museum curators alike.

His signature piece, a rocking chair whose long, inward-pointing rockers vaguely resembled antelope horns, became part of the White House’s arts and crafts collection after a donor gave one to Ronald Reagan, and his work is part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“The work is timeless,” said Jeremy Adamson, who organized an exhibition of Mr. Maloof’s work for the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in 2001. “He remained committed to values of craftsmanship and integrity that made him a beacon for woodworkers around the world. That furniture will last forever.”

Samuel Solomon Maloof was born in Chino, Calif., one of nine children of Lebanese immigrants. A woodworking enthusiast even as a child, he made his mother a broad spatula for turning bread and, more ingeniously, carved dollhouse furniture, cars and a toy revolver with a spinning chamber.

After winning a poster contest in high school, he was hired to do printing and poster work at the Padua Hills Theater in nearby Claremont. He later did graphic design for a company that made filters for the oil industry and built displays for Bullock’s, the department store. In 1941 he was drafted into the Army, serving in the South Pacific and the Aleutian Islands. After the war, he worked as an assistant to the head of the art department at Scripps College in Claremont, where he met Alfreda Ward, an art student, whom he married in 1948. She died in 1998. He is survived by their two children, Samuel W. Maloof of Mentone, Calif., and Marilou Delancey of Alta Loma; his wife, Beverly Wingate; a stepson, Todd Wingate; and four grandchildren.

For the house he bought in Ontario, Calif., Mr. Maloof made furniture out of discarded oak planks from dismantled packing crates and plywood from building sites. His work came to the attention of The Los Angeles Times, which featured it in its Sunday home-design magazine, and in 1951 Better Homes & Garden devoted a feature article to his do-it-yourself designs. That year, the famed industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss commissioned him to furnish Dreyfuss’s new home and office in Pasadena.

“I was working out of a one-car garage,” Mr. Maloof told The New York Times in 2001. “I didn’t have power tools — nothing. He called and said, ‘You don’t know who I am but I know who you are.’ I just about collapsed.” Mr. Maloof designed and made 25 pieces for Dreyfuss, for a grand total of $1,800.

By instinct, Mr. Maloof developed a style that drew comparisons to Shaker and Scandinavian Modern styles. He worked almost entirely by hand, using no nails or metal hardware, the design emerging as he worked. Precise joinery and repeated sanding and polishing lent his work a rock-solid integrity and silken luster that help explain why one of his rocking chairs sold at auction last year for $51,000. “You can’t help but stroke the darn things,” Mr. Adamson said.

Relying entirely on commission work, Mr. Maloof created about 50 pieces a year. Besides turning out the rocking chairs, priced at about $20,000, he made tables, desks, cabinets and chairs. Clients normally waited two years for delivery, although those who wanted his cradles for their babies immediately jumped to the head of the line.

Mr. Maloof’s most ambitious project was the house he bought in 1953 in Alta Loma. Located in a citrus grove at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, it had six rooms. Over the decades, he added 16 more rooms with handmade redwood doors and windows, carved door handles in the shape of flying fish or tusks, Douglas fir rafters and toilet seats in English oak and black walnut.

In 2000, when the state of California decided to put a freeway through Mr. Maloof’s citrus grove, it worked out an agreement to dismantle the house and move it three miles away, where it now functions as a museum and as headquarters of the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts.

In 1985, Mr. Maloof became the first craftsman to receive a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. He declined to identify himself as an artist. His business stationery carried the letterhead “Sam Maloof/Designer-Woodworker,” and his autobiography, published in 1983, was titled “Sam Maloof: Woodworker.”

As for the tables and chairs, they were meant to be used. “They don’t need a sign that says, ‘Do Not Touch,’ ” he told //The Christian Science Monitor// in 1985. “I want my furniture to be touched, to be sat upon, to be eaten upon, whatever.”
 * [[image:maloof.jpg]] ||

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