 Anne Ashworth offers a guide to the big names in furniture
NAME-DROPPING is the key to winning points in a conversation about 20th-century furniture. You need to show awareness of the leading figures and important pieces. The La-Z-Boy recliner, made famous by Friends, does not yet figure among these, although a reassessment of its merits is always possible. Other chairs, however, are more highly regarded.
Gareth Williams, author of the forthcoming The Furniture Machine: Furniture since 1990 and a Victoria and Albert curator who specialises in 20th-century and contemporary furniture, highlights around 20 significant names. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Scot, is synonomous with Art Nouveau in Britain in the early part of the last century. But you should also be familiar with the work of Louis Majorelle, a Frenchman whose furniture has the curved “whiplash” lines and decoration inspired by flowers and trees associated with Art Nouveau.
The stark Red and Blue chair designed in 1918 by Gerrit Rietveld, a Dutchman, represents the antithesis of Art Nouveau style. The chair is among the first important Modernist pieces. Williams explains: “Rietveld strips away all ornament and references to history: he relies for his inspiration on machines and mechanisation.”
Rietveld is also known for his Zig-Zag chair. Made to look as if it were constructed from a single piece of wood, this chair was designed in 1934, but is still manufactured under licence today.
The chairs in your office, however, are more likely to have been inspired by the work of Marcel Breuer, another Modernist. Breuer’s 1926 tubular steel Wassily armchair was inspired by the light and tough structure of the designer’s bicycle. You must decide whether showing off this knowledge at a meeting indicates that you have a superior aesthetic sensibility or are failing to concentrate on the matter in hand.
Le Corbusier is a celebrated designer and architect, but Charlotte Perriand is a much more obscure figure. However, she did collaborate with Le Corbusier on several of his most famous pieces, including the grand confort chair and the chaise longue on which she posed in 1928 wearing a necklace made of industrial ball bearings, pearls being far too traditional for the Modernist mademoiselle.
Mies van der Rohe is the next Modernist name on the Williams list of top people in 20th-century furniture. In 1929 Van der Rohe found time between his major architectural projects to produce the leather-upholstered Barcelona chair. He considered the design of a chair as much of a challenge as that of a building. Ray and Charles Eames, the American husband and wife team, are nowadays known mostly for seating, including the Lounge Chair. The last, designed in 1956, was sold as office furniture, but is now linked with city loft living.
The owner of a Lounge Chair may also aspire to other important 20th-century chairs, including the Panton chair, designed in 1968 from a single piece of plastic by the Swiss Verner Panton; the 1981 Rover chair from the Israeli Ron Arad, an old car seat set in scaffolding; Jasper Morrison’s 1999 Air Chair; and the Scaffolding chair from Tom Dixon, the former design director of Habitat. A Philippe Starck weather-proof, polyethylene Bubble Club chair is the choice for the terrace.
A chair can be even more desirable if it comes with an anecdote attached. For example, the Paimio chair, devised in 1933 by the Finn Alvar Aalto, was made of plywood which he thought would be warm and comfortable for the tubercular patients of a sanatorium, called Paimio. The Tube chair, a 1969 piece from the Italian Joe Colombo, is an early example of self-assembly furniture. Colombo intended that the individual upholstered tubes could be put together in different ways.
The Tube may be quirky, but it seems conservative in comparison with the work of Ettore Sottsass, the Italian co-founder of Memphis, a design collective named after a Bob Dylan song and significant for its pop-influenced output, including the bizarre 1981 Carlton bookcase and room divider. Gareth Williams selects two Dutch groups as the current names to drop: the Droog, which describes itself as “brand and a mentality”, and the moooi, another equally hip business whose products include furniture made from burnt wood. The Smoke Chair from this collection is a 19th-century padded armchair, the ultimate Post-Modern piece.
The Furniture Machine: Furniture Since 1990, by Gareth Williams, is published by V&A Publications in October, price £35
Source: Times Online
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