Marcel Breuer

Early and rare 'Long Chair', designed 1935-1936, produced circa 1935

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature
Christopher Wilk, Marcel Breuer Furniture and Interiors, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1981, pp. 127, 145
Jack Pritchard, View from a Long Chair: the memoirs of Jack Pritchard, London, 1984, front cover, frontispiece, pp. 90, 113, 120, 179
Martin Eidelberg, ed., Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was, New York, 1991, p. 35
Magdalena Droste, Manfred Ludewig and Bauhaus Archiv, Marcel Breuer Design, Germany, 1994, pp. 29, 132-133
James Peto and Donna Loveday, eds., Modern Britain: 1929-1939, exh. cat., Design Museum, London, 1999, pp. 90, 92
Charlotte and Peter Fiell, eds., Decorative Art - 1930s & 1940s, Cologne, 2000, pp. 319, 384
Alastair Grieve, For Ease For Ever, London, 2004, pp. 4, 28, 30, 33, 42
Hugh Aldersey-Williams, British Design, New York, 2010, p. 70
Christopher Wilk, Plywood A Material Story, London, 2017, front cover


Give and Take: The Cosmopolitanism of British Design

By Glenn Adamson

INDEPENDENT WRITER AND CURATOR, NEW YORK

On the second of June, 1961, the SS Canberra - billed as the 'ship of the future' - set sail from Southhampton, bound for far-off Australia. On board were over two thousand people, about half of them intending to emigrate permanently, and a wealth of art and design. There was a restaurant and pool by Sir Hugh Casson. Harry Bertoia's diamond chairs for Knoll, upholstered in canary yellow, graced the "crow's nest." And down in the cleverly titled Pop Inn – a jukebox lounge – an interior by John Wright was enlivened with pyrography murals by a 23-year-old artist by the name of David Hockney.

Wright's armchairs from the SS Canberra are an obvious reminder of the internationalism of British design; they were literally sent on the high seas as emissaries of a newly energised nation. But many other objects in the present sale performed similar roles, or conversely, reflected global currents of influence. Marcel Breuer's prewar "Long Chair," a masterwork by the great German designer, was principally manufactured in Estonia of high-quality Baltic birch. Aluminium die-casting, which Ernest Race used to such effect in his iconic BA3 chair, was pioneered in America, and first applied to furniture by Otto Wagner in Austria. Race adopted it in 1945 to take advantage of British manufacturing capacity in the metal, which had dramatically increased during World War II. Lucie Rie, born and raised in Austria, is considered the most significant of all British potters, having emigrated in 1938 to find refuge from the Nazis. Though her flared bowl with its luminous gold rim was made many years later, it reflects the refined sensibility she imbibed in prewar Vienna.

Today, when Britain's role in the world is hotly debated, it is salutary to remember how very cosmopolitan its design history has been, even (and perhaps especially) in the years when its empire was breaking apart. This is true of ideas just as much as technology. The potter Bernard Leach, despite his reputation for introverted traditionalism, was actually a marvelously syncretic thinker. The "Tree of Life" that appears on the vase in the present sale was originally inspired by ancient cave paintings in China. Leach loved the motif above all, though, because it appears in the art and mythology of so many cultures. Meanwhile, at first glance, William Plunkett – who, as it happened, created designs for another ocean liner, the QE2 – would seem to be the most British of designers. Trained at Kingston School of Art, he operated his own small manufactory in Croydon and even liked to upholster his seating in Harris Tweed. Yet he was born in India, a child of empire, and while his Epsom chair may be named for a town in Sussex it takes its stylistic cues primarily from contemporaneous French designers like Pierre Paulin.

At the other end of the aesthetic spectrum from Leach's earthy earnestness and Plunkett's finely calibrated modernism, there is the rough and tumble phenomenon known as Creative Salvage. This was the design equivalent of New Wave, the post-punk movement in music, and similarly combined sharp intellectualism with a freewheeling experimental spirit. Though the movement wasn't named until 1985 (by Mark Brazier-Jones, Nick Jones, and Tom Dixon), its progenitor was Ron Arad, who had relocated to London from Tel Aviv to study architecture. His shop One Off, founded in 1981, quickly became the engine room of avant garde British design – a space where the new was both made and shown. Arad's use of found objects and materials, as seen in his Rover Chair and Tree Light, were pragmatically expedient, but also indebted to the Duchampian Readymade – an import from France and the USA.

As a final example, consider Deborah Thomas, who operated in the wider orbit of Creative Salvage. She made her way into design from the London theatre scene, and showed primarily at the Notting Hill gallery Theme and Variations. All very British, you might say. Yet it's impossible to look at her compositions of shattered glass without seeing the impact of Arad's work, or equally, her anticipation of sculptural lighting that followed in the succeeding decade, notably by the German designer Ingo Maurer (whose famous Porca Miseria! fixture, made of broken crockery, was designed in 1994). So far as I know, nobody ever decked out an ocean liner with Thomas' ferociously brilliant chandeliers and sent it around the world, bearing a message of Britain's deep connections to everywhere else. Maybe the time has come?