See 100 years of Rose Iron Works, Art Deco history at new Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibit

Another day, another Cleveland gem. Another point of pride little known despite its location right under our noses.

If you’re familiar with Rose Iron Works, you’re ahead of the curve. You already know it’s one of the oldest and finest metalworking studios in the world, and that it’s quietly graced E. 43^rd St. for more than a century.

The rest of us can simply enjoy being gobsmacked by “Rose Iron Works and Art Deco,” a small but mighty new exhibit now on view in the Focus Gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). We’re the ones just now learning of the incredible history of this firm, the ones suddenly swelling with pride – like a blacksmith’s bellows – in Cleveland craftsmanship.

A history of art and craftmanship

Rose is a quintessential case of the immigrant dream come true. After graduating from the guild training system in Budapest and Vienna, Martin Rose – born Mor Revesz, in what is now part of Ukraine – came to America near the turn of the century and quickly found success producing elegant furniture, design pieces, and other objects for a wide range of clients across his adopted Northeast Ohio.

A shop sign from 1931, 21 years after Rose opened at E. 43^rd, harkens back to those early days. A blacksmith in silhouette plies his trade amid a floral wreath, beneath a flowing banner with gold lettering. Hung by chain link, the sign looks Medieval, evoking a place where an ancient trade is practiced. Nearby, a collection of tools, some of them of original design, completes the picture. 

Other works pick up and extend that vined, Art Nouveau motif. A pair of densely spiraled candlesticks, a gift to Rose’s new bride in 1900, four years before he set up shop in Cleveland, resemble organic, living things, but also look so heavy as to be nearly unusable. Likewise a plant stand from 1908, so thickly built and armored it could probably support tons. 

But where the exhibit truly excels is in tracing Rose’s development from Art Nouveau concepts to its adoption of Art Deco, the aesthetic that defines so many great buildings from the era in Cleveland. There’s a marked turn in Rose’s work after 1925, when a major international exhibition took place in Paris and Rose began employing the techniques and geometric motifs now seen in places like Severance Music Center, Terminal Tower and the Cleveland Arcade. Around this time, too, Rose entered into a long partnership with Paul Feher, a French designer active in Paris. 

The luxury of the Halle Brothers Grille, from 1927, is almost inconceivable today. Functionally, it’s just a gate, possibly to a fitting-room area, but what Rose produced is in fact a marvel: an imposing, wrought-iron collection of 15 panels, each boasting a unique, looping floral design. Halle’s must have been quite the store. 

Another impressive work from around the same time is a frieze depicting the history of metalworking, completed in 1931. Scene after small scene proceeds in train on a shelf around the room near the ceiling, like a zoetrope, leaving one to dream of spinning the whole arrangement, causing the frames to come to life. 

Only marginally easier to imagine possessing and actually using is the fountain Rose crafted in 1950 for Norga Construction in Shaker Heights. In this elegant creation, the hard, metallic properties of copper and aluminum are magically transformed into organic matter, the substance of huge lilies reaching vigorously to the sky. 

An even more stunning transformation takes place in a grille Rose submitted to the 1930 May Show, an annual juried exhibition held at CMA from 1919 to 1993. Here, steel, brass, and silver become human flesh, a woman intoxicated by the smell of a flower. Around her, arcs, playful squiggles, and cold straight lines form a pleasing framework through which intricate leafy vines swirl like natural growth. Little wonder this is Rose’s most celebrated work. 

But the coup de grace is the new version of the grille,also made by Rose Iron Works, a modern edition based on an unused design by Feher. Made using contemporary techniques and tools, including 3-D printing, the 2025 work honors but outshines its predecessor with an even more life-like figure, stretching to smell a flower, a strikingly realistic cloth draped languorously over her arm. Go ahead, call it a masterpiece. In terms of execution, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the great sculptures of ages past. 

The other neat trick the new grille accomplishes is bringing the viewer full circle, to the Rose Iron Works of today. It highlights the astounding fact that 121 years after its opening, Rose Iron Works is still a family enterprise, and still has had only three owners. It’s a place that still employs a blacksmith, one who, like its founder, hails from Ukraine. For all its glorious past, Rose is a company with an even brighter future, a legacy bound to last as long as any of its works, as long as we still value things well and beautifully made.