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