Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Private collection, Philadelphia

Diederich spent his childhood in Hungary and Switzerland before moving to Boston to live with his maternal grandfather, the artist William Morris Hunt. There he enrolled in classes at the Boston Art School in 1903. Uninterested in a formal education at that time, however, Diederich moved to the west where he worked as a cowboy for several years.

In 1906, he returned to the east coast to study sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he befriended fellow classmate and sculptor Paul Manship. While in school, Diederich produced animal sculptures that were clearly inspired by his western experience, even winning an award for a piece entitled Bronco Buster. He left the Academy the following year to travel in Europe, settling in Paris to study with Emmanuel Frémiet, the well-known animal sculptor. Diederich’s works were included in several key Paris salons and were highly acclaimed; he received numerous commissions as a result.

With the outbreak of World War I, Diederich returned to the United States, this time to New York, where he continued to create sculptures of animals and also began making decorative furnishings in wrought-iron. These lively two-dimensional objects evolved from Diederich’s silhouette cutouts, a pastime he began as a child and described in the catalogue for his first New York sculpture exhibition of 1920: “As a child of five, I embarked upon my artistic career by cutting out silhouettes of animals with a pair of broken pointed scissors, for I love animals first, last and always.”¹

Combining the decorative with the practical, Diederich created two and three-dimensional silhouettes in the form of his wrought-iron pieces. According to his daughter, Diana Blake, her father’s “work in cast iron (sic) was a very important part of his life, perhaps the most important.”² No doubt, Diederich enjoyed the contrast between the dark and inflexible weightiness of iron with the lively, energetic and seemingly weightless end-product that he skillfully produced. It is easy to imagine that he might have created a prototype in paper on which, with a high degree of craftsmanship, he then constructed this iron and cut metal model.

Created circa 1925, Rooster Crowing: A Standing Lamp is a rare example of Diederich’s wrought iron furniture. Perched atop a stand with twisted iron tripod legs, an over-three-feet tall rooster holds the lamp—with its original mica shade—in its mouth. The graceful curve of the rooster’s tapered neck, beginning from the tip of its beak and ending with the top of its wing, is offset by the curve of the wing which tapers in the opposite direction. Four vertical incisions infer feathers on the wings. From behind the center of the wing sprouts a tail, out of which three curved “feathers” in cut metal emerge, the topmost being the longest that ends in a graceful curl.

The rooster’s legs curve gently backward, echoing the curve of the neck and again creating a counterbalance to the wings at center. The overall effect of opposing curves in the rooster’s form is a visual delight and is contrasted by the linearity of the stand. Suggesting a hint of whimsicality, however, the rooster’s legs are encircled with a spiral of twisted wire that is echoed in the stand’s legs below.

The use of mica in shades gained favor during the Arts and Crafts period around the turn of the century and were popular with Art Deco furniture makers, not only for their dramatic effect, but for their exotic nature as well.