Armchair
Attributed to Peter Behrens
Solid cherry wood, solid palisander and veneer, beech veneer, original spring upholstery with horse hair wadding and cotton damask cover in blush pink and gold with brass studs. H 92, W 60, D 63 cm.
Produced by Heinrich Julius Glückert in Darmstadt, around 1900 (1902?), textile design by Franz von Stuck.
The armchair is a variant of the furniture Peter Behrens designed for the library of his own house in Darmstadt in 1901/1902. This room, "one of the most publicized interiors of the early 20th century" (Tilmann Buddensieg), represents a quantum leap in the design history of German furniture at the dawn of modern design, and this chair is one of the earliest radically modern pieces of seating furniture. The design has been intelligently reduced to its load-bearing and supportive function; there is not one superfluous element that could be dispensed with without compromising stability. The version shown here, attributed to the Heinrich Julius Glückert furniture factory, with its unusual palisander veneer strips, appears straighter, more static than the chair from the Behrens house, whose back rests on only one rear support, due to the two rear legs being raised to form the backrest.
Provenance
Probably originally made for Emil Möbus, Wiesbaden.
From an important European private collection.
Literature
Cf. Breysig, Das Haus Peter Behrens: mit einem Versuch über Kunst und Leben, Darmstadt 1902, p. 56 and 144.
Cf. cat. Peter Behrens und Nürnberg, Nuremberg 1980, cat. no. 134.
For the covers compare a pair of armchairs by Franz von Stuck (inv. no. M 91 1-9,1) in the Villa Stuck in Munich, around 1897/98.