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Vintage Germany Icon Bauhaus B35 Black Leather Chair by Marcel Breuer for Thonet

About the Item

This design icon from 1928, the B35 armchair, was designed by Marcel Breuer in the late 1920s and made by the German Thonet factory in the early 1930s. This piece is made of tubular steel and black leather with natural patina. The materials used and the traces of wear show that this is an early production of this timeless modell. The armrests are finished with solid wood. Following the success of his Wassily chair, Breuer continued to experiment with tubular steel furniture. Like the Wassily chair, the B35 was not a direct representative of the Bauhaus school, but is clearly in line with the Bauhaus design and construction principles, with a modern, stripped-down form made of industrial materials not used today in furniture production. Marcel Breuer was born in 1902 in Hungary. He was an architect and designer. He received a scholarship to study painting and sculpture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1920, but quickly quit and applied to the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany. After completing the preliminary courses there, he studied at the Bauhaus furniture workshop in 1921-1924. He then conducted a furniture workshop in Dessau where he created the first tubular steel armchair (1925-1926), presented in 1927 as the Type B3 Steel Club Chair, later renamed Wassily in honor of the Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky. As his career developed, he began to focus more on architectural designs. In addition to steel tube furniture and plywood elements. Breuer designed over seventy private homes and many university and office buildings. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a traveling exhibition of his works. In 1953 he designed the UNESCO headquarters in Paris with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfulss, and in 1963 he designed the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Thonet is the oldest existing furniture company in the world. It began its long business in 1819 when the carpenter Michael Thonet founded a furniture workshop in Boppard, Germany. A supporter of the Biedermeier style, he specialized in chairs, tables and cabinets characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation and an emphasis on the principles of functionalism. In the 1930s, Thonet's experiments with glued and steam-bent wood furniture, such as his famous Boppard chair (1836), brought international acclaim. Thonet's projects achieved lightness, durability and comfort unprecedented in European furniture at that time. The iconic works of the Thonet collection include: rocking chair No. 1 (1860), cafe chair No. 14 (c. 1859), chair of the Adolf Loos cafe museum (1899), chair No. 209 (c. 1900), Otto Wagner's chair No. 247 (1904) and Josef Hoffmann's No. 811 (1925). In the early 1920s, Gebrüder Thonet also began producing bent tubular steel designs by Bauhaus masters such as Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam. The armchair is in original vintage condition. It has natural patina on the leather, minor scrapes and scratches. The seat is 34 cm high.

Creator:
Marcel Breuer (Designer),Thonet (Maker)
Design:
B35 Lounge Chair
Dimensions:
Height: 34.26 in (87 cm)Width: 24.41 in (62 cm)Depth: 30.32 in (77 cm)Seat Height: 13.39 in (34 cm)
Style:
Bauhaus (In the Style Of)
Materials and Techniques:
Chrome,Leather,Wood
Place of Origin:
Germany
Period:
1930-1939
Date of Manufacture:
circa 1930
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use. The armchair is in original vintage condition. It has natural patina on the leather, minor scrapes and scratches.
Seller Location:
Warszawa, PL
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU6129226662632
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Shop All Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer

The architect and designer Marcel Breuer was one the 20th century’s most influential and innovative adherents of modernism. A member of the Bauhaus faculty, Breuer — like such colleagues as the architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the artists and art theoreticians László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers — left Europe in the 1930s to champion the new design philosophy and its practice in the United States.

Born in Hungary, Breuer became a Bauhaus student in 1920 and quickly impressed Gropius, the German school’s founder, with his aptitude for furniture design. His early work was influenced by the minimalist Dutch design movement De Stijl — in particular the work of architect Gerrit Rietveld. In 1925, while he was head of the Bauhaus furniture workshop, Breuer realized his signature innovation: the use of lightweight tubular-steel frames for chairs, tables and sofas — a technique soon adopted by Mies and others. Breuer’s attention gradually shifted from design to architecture, and, at the urging of Gropius, he joined his mentor in 1937 on the faculty of Harvard and in an architectural practice.

In the 1940s, Breuer opened his own architectural office, and there his style evolved from geometric, glass-walled structures toward a kind of hybrid architecture — seen in numerous Breuer houses in New England — that pairs bases of local fieldstone with sleek, wood-framed modernist upper floors. In his later, larger commissions, Breuer worked chiefly with reinforced concrete and stone, as seen in his best-known design, the brutalist inverted ziggurat built in New York in 1966 as the home of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Breuer’s most famous furniture pieces are those made of tubular steel, which include the Wassily chair — named after Wassily Kandinsky and recognizable for its leather-strap seating supports — and the caned Cesca chair. Breuer also made several notable designs in molded plywood, including a chaise and nesting table for the British firm Isokon and a student furniture suite commissioned in 1938 for a dormitory at Bryn Mawr College. Whether in metal or wood, Breuer’s design objects are elegant and adaptable examples of classic modernist design — useful and appropriate in any environment.

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