When Marcel Breuer was 18 years old, he left his hometown of Pécs, Hungary by train for Vienna, Austria with a scholarship to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. Just a few days there convinced him that was the wrong school for him. Following up on a tip, he made the snap decision to go instead to Weimar, Germany and enroll in the Bauhaus. The new, avant garde design school’s director, Walter Gropius, accepted the brash Hungarian, and in 1920 Breuer was among fewer than 150 students enrolled there.
The curriculum and atmosphere at the Bauhaus was entirely different, and Breuer knew he had made the right decision. Practical craft was emphasized at the Bauhaus, and Breuer channeled his creative efforts designing and producing furniture. In his four years there, the structural medium was primarily wood, not metal.
“A chair, for example, should not be horizontal-vertical,” Breuer wrote in 1923, “also not Expressionistic, Constructivist, conceived solely for functionality, and also not designed to ‘match’ a table, it should just be a good chair, and then it will match a good table.”1 Breuer found particular favor with Gropius, who also had a private architectural practice, helping him with client projects. Breuer graduated from the Bauhaus in 1924 and moved to Paris. He was there only a year when a letter from Gropius invited Breuer to return to Germany and work as a Bauhaus Master in the Cabinetmaker Shop.
The school had been relocated to Dessau and a new campus and buildings were under construction. Breuer bought a new Adler bicycle to ride around the campus and city of Dessau. Impressed with the strength of the steel tube frame and appearance of the plated, curved steel tube handlebar, he had an epiphany and began making sketches of steel tubing furniture.2 When Breuer approached Adler to manufacture steel tubing pieces of his designs, the company showed no interest. He then went to the steel tubing manufacturer and got a positive response.
The first chair to emerge from this design experimentation and several redesigns is known today as the Wassily Chair.3 It was a complex assemblage of bent and straight steel tubing bolted together, with taut fabric used for the seat, seat back and arms. When Gropius saw the new chair and possibilities of tube steel for furniture, he directed Breuer to design furniture for the new Bauhaus primary and secondary buildings. This included folding chairs for the auditorium, stools for the canteen which served as the basis for nesting tables, a convertible sofa and many other pieces.
The cantilever side chair and armchair, which are Breuer’s most famous designs, appeared in 1927. In the later 1920s and 1930s, Breuer began his association with several furniture manufacturers, including Thonet. Inspiration often has many fathers and inevitably, Breuer became involved in design patent disputes with others claiming they were first. Many design imitations followed with just enough variation to skirt charges of plagiarism.
While teaching at the Bauhaus, Breuer also secured interior design commissions with the help of Gropius. In 1927, Breuer married one of students at the Bauhaus, the couple moved off campus to the center of Dessau, and in 1928 Breuer resigned from the school to open his own architectural design practice.
In the early1930s, Breuer began exploring the use of aluminum in furniture design and aggressively pursued and secured companies in Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy to manufacture his designs. Several of his original designs were entered as prototypes in a French competition in November 1933 and Breuer’s designs were deemed the most innovative and swept the first-place prizes. These winning designs entered production the following year.
Near the end of 1935, Breuer began his affiliation with Isokon in England, coinciding with his architectural partnership there. Isokon sought to manufacture modern design furniture of molded plywood. Breuer drew on several of the aluminum designs he had created and modified them for molded plywood. Two of the designs are relevant to this chapter. The first was a reclining chair (sometimes identified as long chair) with lower leg support, and a lounge chair (which Breuer later chose for the living room of his Lincoln, Massachusetts home).4 A full-length upholstered cushion aided comfort. These chairs and other designs for Isokon, were first manufactured in 1936.
In 1937, Breuer closed his practice in England and followed Walter Gropius to Massachusetts and a position at Harvard University.5 From then on, Breuer focused on teaching and his architectural practice. Shortly after Dino Gavina established his furniture company, he bought Breuer’s core design collection and manufactured them throughout the 1960s until Knoll purchased Gavina and its factory in Foligno, Italy. Christine Rae wrote, “The Breuer furniture was added to the Knoll Collection in 1969 as part of the Gavina Group.”6 Knoll’s Breuer Collection was displayed at the Knoll au Louvre exhibition in 1972, including the Reclining Chair with bright red cushion. This chair and Breuer himself featured prominently in The Breuer Collection brochure printed by Knoll.7 The Price List item number for the Reclining Chair was 50-135.8 After several years, the Reclining Chair was discontinued, but the other Breuer chairs and tables have remained in the Knoll catalog.
1. Arnt Cobbers, Breuer (Köln: TASCHEN, 2022), 19.
2. Christopher Wilk, MARCEL BREUER Furniture and Interiors. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 37.
3. When Russian painter and Bauhaus Master, Wassily Khandinsky, first saw the chair in the later 1920s, he praised the design. The chair, which for decades was only known by a model number, was probably given the name Wassily by Dino Gavina when he acquired the rights to Breuer’s designs around 1960.
4. Cobbers. 39.
5. Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933 (Koln:TASCHEN, 2006), 244.
6. Christine Rae, “Marcel Breuer.” Knoll au Louvre. (New York: Chanticleer Press, 1971). Unpaginated
7. Brian Lutz, Knoll – A Modernist Universe. (New York: Rizzoli Internationa Publications, Inc. 2010). 172-173.
8. Nancy N. Schiffer, Knoll Home & Office Furniture. (Atglen: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2006). 49.