Jean Prouvé (1901–1984) was a twentieth-century pioneer in the innovative production of

furniture and architecture.

Determined to be a man of his time, Prouvé explored all the current technical resources in
metalworking, soon abandoning wrought iron for bent sheet steel: in the thirties he produced
metal joinery, his early furniture, architectural components and knockdown buildings, all in
small series.
Beginning with the construction of wrought-iron gateways, railings and windows, from 1924
onwards Jean Prouvé created his first items of furniture. Having discovered electric welding and
the application of diverse techniques of construction, he resorted to sheet-steel (particularly used
in the automobile industry) of an extreme thinness permitting him to obtain a “hollow-body”
which allowed for a structure of exceptional resistance: the reclining chair of 1929 is a typical
example. The use of this metal is found in most of the furniture that marked his development.
Jean Prouvé frequently employed aluminium in the form of corrugated sheet metal and molded
elements.
In 1945, Prouvé built his factory in Maxeville, where he stayed until 1954. Thereafter, he
continued his activities as a consulting-engineer for large architectural projects. Of the opinion
that "in their construction there is no difference between a piece of furniture and a house", he
developed a "constructional philosophy" based on functionality and rational fabrication. Free of
all artifice, the resultant aesthetic chimed with the doctrine of the Union of Modern Artists, of
which Prouvé – with Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand – was a founder
member.
The same principles were applied to the making of furniture – often intended for the public
sector – and to the architecture of the postwar boom. Astute assembly systems for hard-wearing
structures meant that furniture and buildings alike could be readily dismantled, moved about and
adapted.
The Prouvé blend of avant-garde spirit and humanist concerns has lost none of its relevance.
The originality of his different periods is repeatedly rediscovered, from the first items for the
University dormitory in Nancy in 1932 through those for a similar facility in Antony in 1954; the
furniture for Africa; and the knockdown postwar schools and "little architecture machines" of the
sixties.
Aside from educational furniture, Jean Prouvé furnished offices and created chairs, tables,
shelves, bookshelves and cabinets, all following the same construction principles: based on a
sketch, a prototype was realized in order for its details to be assessed through a very strict
evaluation process.
From 1956 onwards, the gallery Steph Simon distributed his furniture. Jean Prouvé contributed
considerably to the reconstruction and urbanization of France after the war. Always being a true
entrepreneur, he was able to break away from traditional means of construction while giving
priority to experience over profit.
The Prouvé blend of avant-garde spirit and humanist concerns has lost none of its relevance. He
filled numerous orders such as the University of Nancy in 1932 and the furniture for the cafeteria
des Arts et Métiers, Cité Internationale Universitaire Paris in 1950. Working with the best
architects, Jean Prouvé left his stamp on many famous examples of twentieth-century building,
most of which are now classified historic monuments.

“Grand Repos” designed by Jean Prouvé

In the limelight
It is clear from leafing through the auction catalogue that the importance and rarity of this piece
was taken into consideration in planning the sale, which in itself could be seen as an ode to
Prouvé.  The auction included works by a handful of his contemporaries and collaborators, but
the spotlight was on Prouvé.  The importance of the fauteuil “Grand Repos,” as he called this
easy chair, was made known by the full-page black-and-white photograph gracing one of the
opening pages of the catalogue, and by a three-page spread with anatomical drawings and
photographs accompanying the lot’s description. Out of this fifty-lot sale leading up to the
“Structure Nomade”—a 1957 ensemble of three academic buildings originally erected in
Villejuif outside Paris—with a dozen of the lots dubbed to be of museum quality, this chair
garnered a price second only to the sale’s namesake building. The associate director of Artcurial,
Fabien Naudan, commented that “the idea for this particular auction was to be very selective and
the surroundings of this piece are very important,” adding that “when the chair previously came
to auction in 2006 it was in an art deco sale, which was not ideal because this is a Union des
Artistes Modernes [or UAM, a group of French designers formed in 1929 who rejected the
lushness of furnishings by Èmile-Jacques Ruhlmann and others] piece and has a different
aesthetic.”

Going way back

The design of the chair exhibits a superb combination of the talents of Prouvé—who began his
career as a metalworker—as an architect, industrial designer, and furniture designer. Prouvé’s
furniture cannot be discussed without taking into consideration his beginnings at the forge
because metal figures so prominently in his designs, and particularly in the engineering of the
base of this chair. He opened his first workshop in 1923, and became one of the founding
members of the UAM in 1929, along with other visionaries of French modernism such as Le
Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand, whose works were also included in the
Artcurial sale.

Three’s a charm
This model, previously owned by a Swiss private collector who purchased it at an Artcurial sale
in 2006, is a remarkably original design. A prototype was presented at the Exposition UAM in
1930, yet it is actually the third in a series of easy chairs designed by Prouvé, the first of which
outfitted several of his family’s residences up until its acquisition by the Centre Pompidou in
1993. The second sold at Sotheby’s in Monaco in 1986 and is now part of the collection of the
Vitra Design Museum in Germany. These three models each have varying details, though this
1930 design is considered the most successful.

Making green easy

Beneath its wheat-green (“blé vert”) finish this chair’s sheet-metal body is a remarkable
technological feat—mounted on rolling ball-bearings that slide along two rails integrated into the
base, with springs placed below the seat on either side to allow the seat and backrest to gently
recline into a sleeping position and return upright by a simple, natural forward movement on the
part of the sitter. On the right-hand side a lock button can be used to keep the back from
reclining. The seat, arms, and headrest are covered with original waxed leather. And, as the
catalogue indicates, this design is evidence of a particular command of an aesthete who
appreciates his comfort.
Marcel Breuer
Hungarian-American Designer, Sculptor, and Architect

Synopsis

His friends and family affectionately called him Lajkó, but the rest of us know him as Marcel
Breuer, the Hungarian-American designer whose career touched nearly every aspect of three-
dimensional design, from tiny utensils to the biggest buildings. Breuer moved quickly at the
Bauhaus from student to teacher and then ultimately the head of his own firm. Best known for
his iconic chair designs, Breuer often worked in tandem with other designers, developing a
thriving global practice that eventually cemented his reputation as one of the most important
architects of the modern age. Always the innovator, Breuer was eager to both test the newest
advances in technology and to break with conventional forms, often with startling results.
Key Ideas
Breuer's Wassily Chair (1927-28) became an instant classic of modern design, and even today it remains
one of the most recognizable examples of Bauhaus design. For this chair, he used the newest innovations
in bending tubular steel for the entirety of the structural frame, thereby demonstrating the possibilities of
modern industry applied to everyday objects.
Breuer's early success in education often overshadows his brilliant career as an architect. Although Breuer
assumed the role of primary designer for some of his most famous buildings, on several others he was
happy to work alongside other giants in the profession, often generously sharing credit with his
collaborators - a sharp contrast with many other high-profile architects in the postwar era.
A pioneer of the International Style in his use of steel and glass, Breuer's affinity for concrete later made
him a key figure in the emergence of Brutalism, which has drawn criticism due to his designs' heavy-
handed massiveness. However, Breuer counterbalanced this tendency in his small-scale houses that are
notable for their sensitive handling of traditional materials, such as wood and brick.
Breuer is one of the most important and best-known figures associated with the Bauhaus, where he was
first a student and later led the furniture design workshop. His reputation as a teacher was further
cemented when he joined Walter Gropius at Harvard University, teaching some of the most successful
architects of the postwar era, including I. M. Pei and Philip Johnson .

Biography

Early Life

Marcel Breuer was born on May 21, 1902, in Pécs, Hungary, a

small town near the Danube River. After graduating from high
school at the Magyar Királyi Föreáliskola in Pecs, Breuer
enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to study
painting, where he had been offered a scholarship. He almost
immediately disliked the program, however, and within weeks
of joining, he left to begin an apprenticeship with a Viennese
architect. Breuer was eager to work with his hands and joined
the cabinetmaking studio of the architect's brother. At age 18,
in 1921, he moved to Weimar, Germany, to enroll at a new
school called the Bauhaus, founded in 1919 with a mission to
marry functional design with the principles of fine art. Its head,
the architect Walter Gropius, immediately recognized Breuer's
talent and promoted him within a year to the head of the
carpentry shop. At the Bauhaus, Breuer produced the furniture
for Gropius' Sommerfeld House in Berlin as well as his
acclaimed series of "African" and "Slatted" chairs. But he also became acquainted with many of
the most important artists of this era, who likewise worked and taught at the Bauhaus, including
Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers. Breuer later reflected
that Klee served as one of his two greatest teachers in life, along with his high school geometry
instructor.
In 1924, he finished his studies at the Bauhaus and briefly relocated to Paris before returning to
the Bauhaus after it moved to Dessau in 1925. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Breuer
supported himself largely from fees garnered from his furniture designs, most notably the widely
reproduced "Wassily" chair, as his architectural commissions were few and far between at this
stage in his career. In 1926, Breuer married fellow Bauhaus graduate Marta Erps. While his
parents were both Jewish, Breuer was forced to officially renounce his faith in order to marry
Erps, due to the anti-Semitic hostilities in Germany at the time.

Mature Work

In 1928, Breuer moved to Berlin, to begin his own

architectural practice; in 1934, he designed the
Dolderthal Apartments for the well-known Swiss
architectural historian Sigfried Giedion in Zurich. Breuer
moved to London in 1936, at the behest of Walter
Gropius, who was concerned for his safety during the
Nazi occupation. Here, he found work with Jack
Pritchard of the Isokon Company, one of the earliest
champions of modern design in Britain, where he
designed the "Long" chair predominantly from plywood.
The following year, Breuer left Europe permanently to
join Gropius in teaching architecture at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachussetts; many of their
students would themselves go on to become legends in
the field, such as I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, and Philip
Johnson. From 1938 to 1941 Breuer and Gropius
collaborated on various architectural projects throughout the northeastern United States,
including each of the architects' own houses as well as the Pennsylvania state exhibition at the
1939 World's Fair in New York.

Breuer finally moved to New York City in 1946, where he would work for the remainder of his
life, and continued the collaborative efforts that had marked much of his career, mostly with
Hamilton Smith. Over the next thirty-five years his practice expanded considerably; although he
had worked mostly on small-scale domestic structures before the war, Breuer increasingly took
on larger and more diverse institutional projects. He sought and regularly received
internationally-renowned commissions, including the Sarah Lawrence College Theatre in
Bronxville, New York (1952); St. John's Abbey and University, Collegeville, Minnesota (1953-
61); the De Bijenkorf department store, Rotterdam (1955-57); the headquarters for the
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Washington, D.C. (1963-68); and the
Atlanta Central Library (1969-80). He retired in 1976, the same year that he was awarded the
Grande Medaille d'Or by the French Academie of Architecture.
 “Wassily Chair” designed by Marcel Breuer

History

A champion of the modern movement and protégé of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, Marcel
Breuer is equally celebrated for his achievements in architecture and furniture. Breuer was an
outstanding student and subsequently a master carpenter at the Bauhaus in the early 1920s. His
entire body of work, both architecture and furniture, embodies the driving Bauhaus objective to
reconcile art and industry. While at the Bauhaus, Breuer revolutionized the modern interior with
his tubular-steel furniture collection — inspired by bicycle construction and fabricated using the
techniques of local plumbers. His first designs, including the Wassily, remain among the most
identifiable icons of the modern furniture movement.

The chair later known as the "Wassily" was first manufactured in the late 1920s by Thonet, the
German-Austrian furniture manufacturer most known for its bent-wood chair designs, under the
name Model B3. It was first available in both a folding and a non-folding version. In this early
iteration, the straps were made of fabric, pulled taut on the reverse side with the use of springs.

The fabric used was made from Eisengarn, a strong, shiny, waxed-cotton thread. It had been
invented in the 19th century, but Margaretha Reichardt (1907-1984), a student at the Bauhaus
weaving workshop, experimented and improved the quality of the thread and developed cloth
and strapping material for use on Breuer's tubular-steel chairs.

The Thonet produced version of the chair is most rare, and went out of production during World
War II.
Most of Breuer's early designs were produced under license by the Berlin-based manufacturer,
Standard-Möbel, Lengyel & Company. The Wassily chair was the only significant early Breuer
design not offered by Standard-Möbel, Lengyel & Co.

After the War years, Gavina picked up the license for the Wassily, along with the Breuer designs
previously sold by Standard-Möbel, Lengyel & Co., and introduced the more recognized Wassily
version that replaced the fabric with black leather straps, though the fabric version was still made
available. In 1968 Knoll bought the Gavina Group of Bologna. This brought all of Breuer's
design into the Knoll catalog.

This chair was revolutionary in the use of the materials (bent tubular steel and eisengarn) and
methods of manufacturing. In 1925 Breuer purchased his first bicycle and he was impressed with
the lightness of its tubular steel frame. This inspired him to experiment with using the material in
furniture design. The design (and all subsequent steel tubing furniture) was technologically
feasible only because the German steel manufacturer Mannesmann had recently perfected a
process for making seamless steel tubing. Previously, steel tubing had a welded seam, which
would collapse when the tubing was bent.

The Wassily chair, like many other designs of the modernist movement, has been mass-produced
since the late 1920s, and continuously in production since the 1950s. A design classic is still
available today. Though patent designs are expired, the trademark name rights to the design are
owned by Knoll of New York City. Reproductions are produced around the world by other
manufacturers, who market the product under different names.