Clara Porset Four Butaque Lounge Chairs in Cognac Leather
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Clara Porset Four Butaque Lounge Chairs in Cognac Leather
About the Item
- Creator:Clara Porset (Designer)
- Dimensions:Height: 41.34 in (105 cm)Width: 29.93 in (76 cm)Depth: 33.86 in (86 cm)Seat Height: 15.75 in (40 cm)
- Style:Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Date of Manufacture:1947
- Condition:Wear consistent with age and use.
- Seller Location:Waalwijk, NL
- Reference Number:Seller: 102111stDibs: LU933115266941
Clara Porset
Cuban-born mid-century furniture maker and interior designer Clara Porset is having a moment in museums such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and beyond, with attention being paid not just to her designs for chairs, lamps and tables but to her life story, with its ties to feminism, modernization and the identification of value in indigenous materials and methods.
Born into a wealthy Cuban family, Porset studied at Columbia University, the Sorbonne and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which she attended at the urging of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and where her teachers included Josef and Anni Albers.
A critic of Cuba’s right-wing government, she left her home country for Mexico, with its more simpatico regime, in 1935. With her Mexican husband, painter Xavier Guerrero, she threw herself into studying that country’s design traditions, and together the two were winners of MoMA’s Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition in 1941. (Porset was unfortunately not recognized at the time for her contribution but has since been credited alongside her husband for the entry.)
Like Porset, other designers of the mid-century era such as Cynthia Sargent, Don Shoemaker and the Bauhaus-trained architect Michael van Beuren who had relocated to Mexico found inspiration in their adopted country. Klaus Grabe, Morley Webb and van Beuren were also named among the Mexico-based winners of MoMA’s 1941 competition. (And van Beuren's furniture brand Domus produced Porset's designs in addition to his own.)
Fascinated by a Spanish-inflected Mexican wood-and-wicker chair called the butaque, Porset developed her own version by tweaking proportions and incorporating new materials.
According to art critic and curator Ana Elena Mallet, its design was “a manifestation of her profound engagement with Mexican craft traditions” at a time when “discussions surrounding the definition of Mexican identity were paramount within the larger political landscape.” In this view, “Porset’s Butaque becomes not merely a chair but a tangible expression of the socio-political discourse of its time,” she says. Or, as Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator of architecture and design, told the New York Times, “This is the Latin American chair.”
Porset designed many other chairs, some in collaboration with the preeminent Mexican architect Luis Barragán. She returned to Cuba in 1959, after Fidel Castro came to power, with high hopes, but when her plans to start a design school (under Che Guevara, Castro’s minister of industries from 1961 to 1965) foundered, she returned to Mexico, where she continued to promote design for the rest of her life.
Find vintage Clara Porset furniture for sale on 1stDibs.
Established in 2006, Morentz has a team of approximately 55 restorers, upholsterers, interior advisers and art historians, making it a gallery, workshop and upholstery studio, all in one. Every day, a carefully selected array of 20th-century furniture arrives from all over the world at the firm’s warehouse, where the team thoroughly examines each piece to determine what, if any, work needs to be done. Whether that means new upholstery or a complete restoration, Morentz's aim is always to honor the designer’s intention while fulfilling the wishes of the client. The team is up to any challenge, from restoring a single piece to its original glory to furnishing a large-scale hotel project.
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