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Jacques Lipchitz

Jacques Lipchitz

Jan 18, 2017

Cubist sculpter Jacques Lipchitz has caught our eye this week. Lithuanian and Jewish, he left home after school, moved to Paris and started to mix with the likes of Picasso and and Juan Gris in the early 20th century. The interaction with this crowd at this period in Paris influenced his style. After much success he later cemented his status as one of the influential cubist sculptors.

He became a resident of France in 1925 and ended up living in a house he commissioned Le Corbusier to build. Forced to flee France in the second world war because of his Jewish heritage, Lipchitz relocated to the USA. There he moved away from his cubist style and started working on more organic figures in bronze, incorporating the themes of Judaism and persecution. You can find such work at Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater.

Tubular Times

Feb 27, 2014

Marcel Breuer is a designer who can be given the accolade of leading a modernist tubular furniture revolution that dominated 1920/30's design. 

In 1925 he produced this chair, Club Chair (middle).  Drawing on a the designs of the De Stijl furniture by Rietveld but also really taking into account the shape and space of a regular club chair.

  

 

 

Its radical enough for us to look at the leather version in 2014 and see that the other two are seriously cutting edge, but this was 1925 for christ sake!  Really it was a post war period when designers could take advantage of new manmade materials and production techniques.

From then on everyone was at it.  Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Mart Stam, Charlotte Perriand and Anton Lorenze for Thonet.

     

There was a bit of a legal scuffle when it came to who was responsible for the cantilever design.  A chair with no back legs and one continuous line.  Though Marcel Breuer insisted that he was responsible for this design, it is widely reported that Mart Stam first came up with the idea after making a prototype chair with gas pipes.

      

Whoever is responsible, it's bloody lovely chair and we're lucky enough to have a Thonet version designed by Anton Lorenze in at the moment.

  

  

As well as some other modernist inspired tubular furniture.