Chairs, Chair Design and Chair Designers
Estimate £2,000 – £3,000 ($3,002 – $4,503)
Sale 5533
20th Century Decorative Art & Design
24 March 2010
London, South Kensington
'TUBE' CHAIR, DESIGNED 1969
for Flexiform-Prima, plastic cylinders, steel clips now lacking rubber balls, replacement upholstery, original worn upholstery now detatched and retained
23 in. (58 cm.) wide
Via Christie’s.
In September I visited Paris and L’Arche in La Defence. I took the lift to the top floor of L’Arche which has a museum of communication. There I found several chairs to enable viewing various tromp l’oeils. I didn’t know their provenance until I bought the book 100 masterpieces of the Vitra Design museum in Vienna at Prodomo Windows. From that excellent catalog I learned these chairs are most likely variations on the original Sandows Chaise designed by Rene Herbst.
About Rene Herbst
Born in Paris in 1891, René Herbst studied architecture in London and Frankfurt from 1908. After finishing his studies, he traveled extensively in Russia and Italy. In 1919 he started working as a furniture designer and interior decorator in Paris. He founded Etablissements René Herbst to produce the pieces he designed.
In 1925 René Herbst designed several exhibition stalls for the Paris “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes”.
In 1927 René Herbst designed the revolutionary and functional “Chaise Sandows” seat furniture. The frames were nickel-plated tubular steel, the seat and back was made of rubber strips stretched taut and fastened to the frame by hooks at the end.
René Herbst first showed his “Chaise Sandows” at the 1929 Salon d’Automne, where Le Corbusier also presented furniture with tubular steel frames.
In 1930 René Herbst joined Robert Mallet-Stevens, Francis Jourdain, and others in founding the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM); a large group of artists and designers committed to Modernism joined the co-founders. The UAM was founded as a countermovement to Art déco, which the UAM artists repudiated because they found it overloaded with decoration and too ornamental. In 1945 René Herbst was elected chairman of the UAM. The UAM organized exhibitions in Paris under the heading of “Les Formes Utiles” (Utilitarian Forms).
cited from René Herbst.com
Sandows is French for the rubber strips or bungees that form the seating and back of the chair.
Recently, at a Paris auction of Christie’s this Sandows Chair that reportedly belonged to Rene Herbst own collection was sold for € 4,375.
On December 8, 2009 this Hand Foot Chair by Pedro Friedberg sold for at Christie’s for $13,750.
Christie’s is always digging up some special chair:
From it’s Lot notes on this Lounge Chair by Lucien Engels:
A Partially Ebonized Birch Low Chair, circa 1954 with painted metal details 39¾ in. (101 cm.) high
Estimate $4,000 – $6,000
Sale 2392, Historical Design Reflects: The East 61st Street Years, 8 December 2009, New York, Rockefeller Plaza
In 1950 Lucien Engels, an architect by training, received the commission to extend the home of Emile Vandervelde II, an important Socialist statesman, to design and build a new recreational building in Oostduinkerken together with a fellow architect, Roger de Winter. The layout for the building followed the same architectural spirit as the UNESCO building in Brussels which they designed several years later. The commissioned furniture was conceived to harmonize with both the color tonalities and form of the building. This commission was a master work for Lucien Engels which expressed the optimism of the post-war years and the idealism of a Socialist state from a modernist point of view. Only ten of the originally thirty executed chairs survived the demolition of the building.
Update: Price Realized $4,750
Last edited by gje on December 11, 2009 at 10:10 PM
3 Lounge Chairs by Jens Quistgaard at Christies 30 September, 2009, location London, South Kensington
Price Realized £8,125 ($13,033)
via Cristie’s