Displaying items by tag: chairs

What distinguishes a chair designed by an architect rather than a furniture designer? Whey would an architect want to design a chair? These and many other ideas are explored in “Chairs by Architects” (Thames & Hudson).

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is reassembling, restoring and scrutinizing parlor furniture that scandalized some Philadelphians when it was new.

The suite of gilded chairs, tables and couches was produced in 1808 for the Philadelphia drawing rooms of the merchant William Waln and his wife, Mary Wilcocks Waln, who made fortunes partly in the Chinese opium trade. On the neo-Classical pieces, designed by the British émigré architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a fellow British immigrant, the artist George Bridport, painted petals and griffins.

In conjunction with Stenton’s exhibition, LOGANIA: Stenton Collections Reassembled, Stenton has brought together known Logan family Queen Anne chairs and comparable examples from public and private collections. This lecture and workshop will provide a close study of chairs that may appear the same or very similar on the outside, but are structurally different on the inside. Why these differences? Where did they come from? What do they tell us about chair making in Colonial Philadelphia? Join us at Stenton on Friday April 17th for this special workshop exploring Queen Anne chairs and their construction. Workshop will be led by Laura Keim, Stenton’s Curator, and Philip Zimmerman, Scholar and Decorative Arts Consultant. Tickets are Required.

Ticket prices are $50 for General Admission, $45 for Friends of Stenton or NSCDA/PA members. Fee includes buffet lunch. Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 215-329-7312 for more information or for reservations.

Piece by piece, the furnishings of the last Hawaiian queen, Liliuokalani, are returning to Iolani Palace here, on a grassy square wedged between office buildings and populated by egrets. The royal property was dispersed through auctions and giveaways around 1900, but benefactors are retrieving it from antiques stores, thrift shops, backyards, storage units, museums and government offices worldwide.

During a recent tour of the palace, an Italianate 1880s building that became a museum in 1978, its curator, Heather Diamond, and its docent educator, the historian Zita Cup Choy, described how chairs, tables, dinnerware and cuff links had ended up scattered.

Beginning on July 12, Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, the former Los Angeles home of the Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra, will replace all mid-century furnishings with their Cold War-era counterparts from Eastern Europe. The objects, including chairs, tables, lamps, phones, pictures, books, and cooking utensils, will be provided by the nearby Wende Museum, which is devoted to preserving the Cold War artifacts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Although the two design cultures share aesthetic tendencies, they have often been examined separately. The provocative installation, titled “Competing Utopias,” will present modern design from the East and West in a unifying context.

According to the Neutra House, the installation is meant to raise more questions than it could possibly answer. For example, Why do design objects from the East fit so seamlessly, often invisibly, into a high design mid-century home from the West? The exhibition looks at the Cold War era from a broader perspective than the typical political lens, focusing on the global competition that took place to see who would define what modernity looked like and how it functioned.

 The Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Washington, is celebrating the classic elegance of Scandinavian mid-century design with the exhibition “Danish Modern: Design for Living.” Organized by The Museum of Danish America in Elk Horn, Iowa, “Danish Modern” features simple and sophisticated furnishings designed and crafted in Denmark in the 1950s and 1960s -- a particularly prosperous period for the style.

The exhibition includes household items such as toys, lamps, and serving pieces, as well as a swath of chairs. Celebrated for its form, function, and consideration for the human body, it’s no surprise that a plethora of iconic chairs originated during the heyday of Danish Modern design. The show at the Nordic Heritage Museum features Arne Jacobsen’s cocoon-like “Egg” chair, graceful “Swan” Chair, and stackable “Seven" chair as well as Helge Sibast’s spindly “No. 8” chair and Hans Wegner’s curvaceous “Round” chair, which was so popular during the middle of the 20th century that it became known simply as “the Chair.”

Sit Down! Chairs from Six Centuries (21 October, 2010–16 January, 2011) at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, celebrates one of the most useful objects found wherever people gather. Sit Down! considers broad stylistic trends in European and American furniture from 1470 to the present, including Gothic, rococo, neoclassical, the revivals and reforms of the nineteenth century, and the American studio movement of the twentieth century. The exhibition examines the evolution of style, the nature of technological innovation, and the social meaning of seating furniture. Works on display are from the museum’s collection, with important loans of works by Samuel Gragg, Gustave Herter, Josef Hoffmann, Marcel Breuer, and Robert Venturi. Paintings, portraits, and pattern books complement the selection and establish cultural context.

Genre-defying painter, sculptor, and illustrator, Richard Artschwager (1923-2013), died February 9, 2013 in Albany, NY. He was 89.

Artschwager, who was often linked to the Pop Art movement, Conceptual Art, and Minimalism, resisted classification through his clever genre mixing. His most well known sculpture, Table with Pink Tablecloth (1964) is an amalgamation of Pop Art and Minimalism and consists of a box finished in colored Formica, creating the illusion of a wooden table draped in a pink tablecloth. Artschwager often used household forms in his work including chairs, tables, and doors. In his paintings, Artschwager often painted black and white copies of found photographs and then outfitted them with outlandish frames made of painted wood, Formica or polished metal.

Artschwager was born in 1926 in Washington, D.C. and went on to study at Cornell University. In 1944, before he could finish his degree, he was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe. Upon returning to the United States after World War II, Artschwager completed his degree and decided to pursue a career in art. He moved to New York City and began taking classes at the Studio School of the painter Amédée Ozenfant, one of the founders of Purism. With a growing family and bills to pay, Artschwager took a break from making art to start a furniture-making business. After a fire destroyed his workshop, Artschwager returned to making art, developed his defining style, and was taken on by the Leo Castelli Gallery, which represented him for 30 years.

A few days prior to Artschwager’s death, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan closed a major career retrospective of his work. It was the second of its kind to be organized by the museum.