Not to Be Missed: Rose Iron Works at Cleveland Museum of Art

One of the most dazzling and best-curated exhibitions on view in Northeast Ohio in many years is the exhibition on the Cleveland firm Rose Iron Works currently in view in the Focus Gallery, just off the main entrance of the Cleveland Museum of Art.  Organized by the museum’s curator of decorative arts, Ada de Wit, it’s visually outstanding, and also tells a remarkable story of a local company.  It’s worth taking the trouble to visit it more than once. 

Rose Iron Works is celebrated for creating the best Art Deco Ironwork in the United States in the early 1930s, notably a remarkable decorative screen, in the collection of the museum, which is regularly featured in survey books on Art Deco and American art. 

Remarkably, the firm, which was founded well over a century ago, is still in business,  with its tools and machines, it’s archives of original drawings, it’s specialized library filled with trade catalogues and rare books, and a collection of small iron objects from Europe, many dating back to the medieval period.   Through a relatively small but extremely well chosen group of masterworks produced by the firm, Ada de Wit has skillfully laid out the history of the enterprise, from the early training of the firm’s founder, Martin Rose, who was blessed with a remarkable, upturned Victorian moustache, to a remarkable decorative screen which was completed by the company early this year.

Like much of the decorative work and industrial design produced here in Cleveland, the work of the firm had its roots in the rich heritage of metalwork and specialized craft skills practiced in Central Europe from the middle ages on.  Martin Rose, the founder of the company, was born in 1868, in Czepe, Hungary, now Chepa in Ukraine.  Born to the name Mor Rosenbluh,  over the course of his life Rose changed his name twice, first in 1898 when he opened his own workshop in Budapest and adopted a more Hungarian sounding name, Mor Revesz, and then after moving to Cleveland in 1908 when he anglicized his name to Martin Rose.  As a young man, Rose  trained as a locksmith and iron worker in Nagyvard (now Orcal in Rumania), as well as in Budapest and Vienna.  Notably, in Budapest he worked for Guyla Jungfer (1841-1908), perhaps the leading master of iron work in Hungary at the time, who did work for the Parliament in Budapest as well as the Royal Castle.  There he gained mastery of a variety of metal-shaping techniques outside the repertory of most iron workers. 

Rosenbluh went on started his own firm in Budapest, which had about twenty employees, and the virtuosity of his work in this period is represented in the show by an iron candlestick, which he made for his bride Margaret Mahrer (1879-1973), on the occasion of their marriage in 1900.  But in Budapest, apparently because he was Jewish, Rose confronted punitive taxes and other forms of government harassment, and consequently he moved to Cleveland in 1903, where he reestablished his workshop.  His wife bore three sons, all of whom became involved in the family business. 

Shortly after his arrival, Rose created a masterfully well-modeled iron rose, which he carried with him to the office of prospective patrons, to demonstrate the technical skills he had mastered in Hungary.  Gyula Jungfer also made realistic iron flowers, including roses, one of which he present to the Emperess Elizabeth of Austria.  Of course since Martin’s name was Rose, the object served as a the perfect logo for the brand identity of his firm, and it was often featured in early advertisements. 

Rose’s firm made simple utilitarian objects such as brackets, but its reputation was built from the considerably more elaborate gates, grilles, balustrades and other forms of elaborate custom work that it produced for banks, government buildings, and the homes of wealthy Clevelanders.  These displayed unrivaled technical finesse.  Rose worked in several styles, including European baroque, medieval Gothic, Art Nouveau.  One of the most notable creations of Rose’s early phase of work in Cleveland was a plant stand in a rather heavy, Central-European brand of Art Nouveau that he made as a gift for his wife around 1907-1908.  (This is now owned by the Western Reserve Historical Society.)  The astonishing elaboration and complexity of his best work is also represented by a door grille that the firm produced around 1925-26 for the back door of a Cleveland banker.

In the 1920s, however, a new machine-age style came into vogue, now known as Art Deco, which was prominently featured in 1925 in a huge world’s fair in Paris, The International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Art, which had 15,000 exhibits and attracted 16 million visitors.  Whereas Art Nouveau employed organic, sinuous, plant-like forms, Art Deco celebrated the machine age, and generally featured crisp geometric shapes, such as circles and right angles.  Notably, the exposition featured a huge display of metalwork in this style from the atelier of the Paris-based metalworker Edgar Brandt, who created the main gates of the exposition and also had a huge showroom in which he displayed his creations. 

In 1929 Rose Iron Works hired a master of this new decorative approach, Paul Fehr, who had been designing in Paris for the metalwork firm owned by a Hungarian master, Paul Kiss.    In 1929 he overheard Kiss instructing a journalist not to mention Fehr’s role in designing an object in a newspaper story, and he promptly resigned.  Shortly afterwards Fehr accepted an offer from Martin Rose’s son Stephen to come work for Rose Iron Works in Cleveland.  Rose had done some work in an Art Deco style before hiring Fehr, notably a grille for the Halle Department Store which is included in the exhibition.  But Fehr was a remarkably gifted and facile draftsman, who brought a creative spark to every new project, and over the next five years he produced a body of designs which established Rose Iron Works as the leading workshop for Art Deco metalwork in the United States. 

Unfortunately, Fehr’s arrival coincided with the stock market crash of October 1929, but somewhat paradoxically, this had an artistically beneficial effect, since it inspired Rose to create a showroom to which he could invite prospective customers, and to fill it with work of breathtaking beauty and fine craftsmanship. 

Surely the most extraordinary piece created by the firm is the Art Deco screen I mentioned at the outset, recently acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art, which features a naked dancer, apparently modeled on the African-American dancer Josephine Baker, who was the rage in Paris at the time.  Her graceful figure is surrounded by a framework of flowers, leaves, and bold geometric shapes.  While the design is superb, what lifts the piece to masterpiece stature is the handling of the metalwork.  The figure is made of gold-plated brass, the stylized flowers and foliage of silver-plated steel, and the decorative framework has a rich variety of coatings and textures, including  hand-hammered and machine-hammered steel.  In addition to its power when seen from a distance, the screen is also fascinating to examine up close, inch by inch.  The piece is said to have been made on speculation for the Green Room of Severance Hall, but since the prospective patron died, it remained with the Rose family until it was acquired by the Cleveland Museum. 

Also remarkable and unparalleled is a frieze of 1930-31, designed by Fehr in an Art Deco mode, which illustrates the history of metalwork as it developed from ancient times.  To keep his men busy, Rose put his crew to work on the piece, which was made with metal scavenged from scrap automobile fenders. 

While Fehr left the company in 1935, for personal reasons, his designs continued to be used for years afterwards.  For example, a drawing for a fountain he made around 1930, with wonderful curvaceous plant forms, was finally translated into metal in 1950 as a entryway fountain for the Nase Construction Company in Cleveland Heights.  And the firm has also produced work for other designers, notably Viktor Schreckengost’s Time and Space sculpture, which in November 2023 was reinstalled at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. 

One of the most remarkable objects in the exhibition is a decorative screen produced early this year, which is quite similar to the famous screen in the Cleveland Museum, but with a differently posed  central figure of a nude dancer, based on an alternate design drawn by Fehr.  Producing this work was an odd mixture of urban archeology and high technology.  On dusty back shelves, Bob Rose, the current owner of the firm, found custom-made tools for stamping the leaves and shaping the inner frame of iron circles. But he also made use of advanced new techniques, such as 3-D printing and electric discharge machining, which uses electric sparks to carve extremely hard materials.  A wonderful tribute to a great moment in Cleveland art, the show also celebrates a special form of creativity, combining design with fine craftsmanship, that’s still very much alive in Cleveland today.

Rose Iron Works and Art Deco
July 6 – October 19, 2025

Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Boulevard
Cleveland, OH 44106
Clevelandart.org