Review: ‘Rose Iron Works and Art Deco’ at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

The Rust Belt has seen better days in the last 100 years, but something you can’t take from them is their architecture. Whenever I visit Cleveland, I tend to stay at The Arcade, a massive structure from 1890 that used to be a Gilded Age shopping mall and is now a Hyatt Regency. It’s much the same when you visit Detroit, where some hipster bed and breakfast has taken over a first-rate Art Deco building. These cities were frozen in a state of beauty. If New York somehow lost all its income tomorrow, future tourists might have to book a room inside the Barclays Center.

A slice of Cleveland’s history with decor is the subject of “Rose Iron Works and Art Deco,” recently opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition tells the tale of the first 30 years of the Rose Iron Works studio, which taught the city much about design from the turn of the century until the Great Depression, crafting its lamps, grilles and ornaments with a flair that would be felt for decades to come. Martin Rose, born Mór Rosenblüh, moved to Cleveland from Hungary in 1903. He was trained in Budapest and Vienna in the classical styles of Gothic and Baroque, but when he arrived in America, he began to incorporate the acanthus and organic forms of Art Nouveau. His story is a little like the one depicted in that recent film The Brutalist, only it’s set earlier and probably not as pro-heroin.

One early example of the studio’s work, Rose (c. 1904), shows the level of detail for which the firm would be known. The wrought iron petals crinkle as if they are a day old, resilient but not idealized. A simple sign from the same period for the Colonial Hotel’s Grill and Buffet is similarly redolent with nature. These little details showed the people of the city how design could be integrated into their lives. “We are the only ones in Cleveland,” Rose told the Plain Dealer in 1905, “but in a European city of this size there would be at least 200 little shops like ours, and the men all busy too.”

The masterpiece in this show, and perhaps the best work to come out of the studio, was Muse with Violin Screen (1930). The work came after Rose brought on the French designer Paul Fehér and began to shift to Art Deco, a style of which this screen is now thought to be exemplary. Its success emerges from its different planes. First, you have the steel bars, which are vertical and rigid, but stylized in steel. Moving in from the outside, you have new angles that begin to zig-zag, but then, wait, other flourishes begin to curve. The curves are playful but no less precise and begin to sprout plants. Moving further in still, the rounded parts proliferate, and plants begin to grow inside them. Just when you think the order is going to break completely, there appears the muse in gold. She’s naked, but a silver robe drapes from her as though she is tired and just had to get it off. Her body has realistic flabs and folds, for she is the only real chaos in this scene, throwing all the order into, well, relief.

What a triumph. These days, when designers try to merge the natural and futuristic, we end up with the Oculus.

“Rose Iron Works and Art Deco” is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through October 19, 2025.

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