Marcel Breuer Long Chair in Icelandic Long Haired Sheepskin by Isokon circa 1970

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Marcel Breuer Long Chair in Icelandic Long Haired Sheepskin by Isokon circa 1970

About the Item

Marcel Breuer long chair in Icelandic long haired sheepskin by Isokon circa 1970 Bauhaus Marcel Breuer 'Long Chair' birch bent ply with Icelandic long haired sheepskin hide by Isokon circa 1970s, the ‘Long chair’, with its bent frame of laminated golden birch wood supporting the shaped timber seat and back, this chair has been completely restored and newly upholstered in the finest Icelandic sheepskin, these hides come from rare Icelandic breeds of sheep, the characteristics of these hides include a super long fleece with hair of at least 4 or 5 inches, much longer than British sheep breeds, a truly stunning and unique one of a kind chair. The chair ranks as one of the highlights of inter-war modernism, its use of moulded plywood anticipating the direction of post-WWII furniture design and manufacture. With its variants, and along with the plywood chairs of the renowned Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, from the 1930s, the ‘Long chair’ is one of the earliest examples of ‘organic’ plywood furniture. Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) was born in Hungary. He attended the Weimar Bauhaus between 1920 and 1924 and then was the ‘Young Master’ of its furniture worksop in Dessau from 1925-1928. From 1922, Breuer designed innovative wood-slat furniture and from 1925 also metal furniture beginning with his now iconic ‘B3’ (known as the ‘Wassily chair’ from the 1960s), the first modern tubular-steel chair for the domestic interior. From 1929 Breuer also designed cantilevered chairs from bent metal tubing, beginning with ‘B32’, later known as ‘Cesca’. (The firts cantilevered chair was designed by Mart Stam in 1926). The experimental nature of plywood as a new material for furniture making, saw the ‘Long chair’ undergo several modifications over time for strength and durability. Nonetheless, its gentle contouring and simple, lightweight, elegant form anticipate concerns further elaborated on by prominent post-war designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and Eero Saarinen. Marcel Breuer left Bauhaus in 1928 and then worked in Berlin, Switzerland and England. He migrated to America in 1937 where he, along with Gropius, attained a celebrated architectural career. Condition report: The chair has been newly reupholstered in the finest Icelandic sheepskin hide and re lacquered, the chair is offered in excellent condition. Dimensions: Height 32” inches / 81.28cm Width 24” inches / 60.96cm Length 52” inches / 132.08cm.

Creator:
Marcel Breuer (Designer),Isokon (Manufacturer)
Dimensions:
Height: 32 in (81.28 cm)Width: 52 in (132.08 cm)Depth: 24 in (60.96 cm)
Style:
Bauhaus (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Birch,Sheepskin
Place of Origin:
United Kingdom
Period:
1970-1979
Date of Manufacture:
1970s
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use.
Seller Location:
Longdon, GB
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU1832317254571

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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