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Auction 9 December 2020 1pm EST

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450 Park Avenue, New York (map)

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Viewing

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Southampton

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1 Hampton Road, Southampton, NY 11968

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4-9 December

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Monday-Saturday 10 AM – 6 PM

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Sunday 12 PM – 6 PM

\n","auctionDetailsSmall","New York Auction 9 December 2020","extraInfo","

DesignNewYork@phillips.com
\n+1 212 940 1265

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From left to right, selections from: Gino Sarfatti, Pair of table lamps, model no. 523, circa 1964; Gino Sarfatti, Pair of table lamps, model no. 594, circa 1960; Gino Sarfatti, Pair of table lamps, model no. 585, circa 1958; Gino Sarfatti, Table lamp, model no. 568/N, Circa 1960.

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Written by Laura Raskin

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Though Gino Sarfatti created more famous luminaires—the 2097, for example, a chandelier with 30 steel-plated arms and softly drooping wires that quoted and reinvented its crystal archetype—it is his 1063 floor lamp from 1954 that best highlights his astonishingly avant-garde designs.

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Gino Sarfatti, Rare ceiling light, model no. 2041, circa 1946. Estimate $30,000 - 50,000. Design New York.

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His muse was a fluorescent slimline light bulb, which he encased in a 7’ tall aluminum tube painted with his signature “crackled” white, black, or gray lacquer. The reactor is contained in an aluminum box, also in the crackled lacquer, and is connected to the tube by thin, chrome rods. As with his other roughly 400 designs from the late 1930s to the early 1970s as the founder and generative heart of the Italian lighting company, Arteluce, Sarfatti celebrated what others obscured. The transformer here is as important as the slender tube, creating a figurative tension in the way the former steadies the latter, like partners on the ice.

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Sarfatti trained as an aeronautical engineer, and one can see his first calling in his work as a designer. He appeared uninterested in making sculpture, but inevitably arrived at it through mechanics, structure, and an obsessional subservience to the way one component met another—washers, screws, plates, and tubes. Indeed, Sarfatti’s first tagline for his business was “Rational Lighting.” He was aligned with artists Luca and Albe Steiner and Lucio Fontana, and his partners and collaborators at Arteluce included the architects Maurizio Tempestini and Franco Buzzi and designer Franco Albini. “His irritation regarding the superfluous, the gratuitous, was accentuated: the hardness of certain details definitely went back to a polemic attitude against anything ‘easy,’” write Marco Romanelli and Sandra Severi in Gino Sarfatti: Selected Works 1938-1973. He fashioned technical equipment to the extent that it performed a specific task he wanted from it—such as malleable plastic coated wires or perforated metal diffusers—and backed into beauty as a result.

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Gino Sarfatti, Floor lamp, model no. 1063, circa 1954. Estimate $20,000 - 30,000. Design New York.

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Sarfatti’s path to light as the creative force in his life, and in the ecumenically spiritual sense, is not as surprising as his early life might suggest. He was born in Venice in 1912 to an affluent Jewish family who lived in a large house with a private garden overlooking the Grand Canal. A brilliant student, Sarfatti moved to Genoa in 1930 and enrolled in an aeronautical engineering program. But at 23 he was forced to return to Venice to help shore up his family: His father, Riccardo (Dick) Sarfatti, was a food importer/exporter and was left in economic ruin after two shipments of wheat rotted during a naval blockade imposed by the League of Nations. Gino took a job in Murano with a family friend who ran a business producing blown glass for lamps. Discovering his natural affinity for inventiveness with the forms—he turned a vase into a lamp for a client—he soon founded his first company, Lumen. In 1938, he left Lumen and founded Arteluce, opening a store on Corso Littorio in Milan, creating a mini contemporary design district with its neighbors Scaglia and Casa&Giardino, which sold pared-down furnishings for an emerging middle class.

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Arteluce wasn’t in business for long when Sarfatti, his wife, and two children were forced to flee to Switzerland in 1940—chased by guard dogs at the border—because of the growing threat of Mussolini’s racial laws. Arteluce kept its doors open during Sarfatti’s exile, and when he eagerly returned to Milan in 1945, the company entered its most fertile and groundbreaking period. Freed from two decades under dictatorship, Milan craved reinvention, and its artists, architects, and designers—including Sarfatti—spurred a decade of creativity and innovation.

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Gino Sarfatti, Pair of table lamps, model no. 585, circa 1958. Estimate $5,000 - 7,000. Design New York.

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The 1063 floor lamp was born of and into this era, a pure example of early minimalism and Sarfatti’s rationalist drive, and its genius recalls artists we can’t be sure he was influenced by. Some he predated. Alexander Calder, Giacometti, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin. “His break with the past was flagrant and sought after, but not sudden and ideological,” write Romanelli and Severi. He is described as indifferent to marketing and advertising (though Arteluce excelled at both); a brilliant entrepreneur propelled forward by refining and revisiting function. He carved, added, and excavated using new materials, new bulbs, and new technology. Sarfatti said, “To illuminate means to give light wherever we may be.” Arteluce had a humanist mission, freeing light from static and formal locations and bringing it to wherever a person wanted or needed to be.

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His lamps disrupted the traditional shaded forms, with hinges, moveable arms, and sometimes handles, which allowed a user to direct and deflect light for task or mood desired (such as 568). Evolving from his spotlights, which Sarfatti deemed one of his most important models, 585 is an indirect table lamp from 1958 with a lacquered aluminum screen that curves around a 40W bulb. These ideas of mobility, transformation, and portability made Sarfatti’s lamps the forerunners to architectural fixtures—lights that enhanced and worked with architectural space. They are also what ultimately made Sarfatti a lighting designer, and not a designer of lighting fixtures. He understood light as a material, as important as concrete or stone. There may be no better example than the installation of illuminated “clouds” he created using Plexiglas tubes for Carlo Mollino’s Teatro Regio.

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Gino Sarfatti, Table lamp, model no. 568/N, Circa 1960. Estimate $1,000 - 1,500. Design New York.

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Despite the futuristic look and functionality of Arteluce’s lamps and its savvy, showroom-like stores, its workshop, with Sarfatti at the helm, maintained its bespoke production process, even as mechanical tools replaced manual ones. In 1973, Sarfatti sold Arteluce to FLOS, left Milan, and never designed again. While the reasons remain somewhat ambiguous, one of the may have been that he simply didn’t want to scale up. His abandonment of his company at the top of its game, and his, may also be related to an inherent tension, as described by his son Riccardo, between his Venetian origins—“the feeling of belonging to a distinct and separate world...where everything flows with the rhythm of the water, where modernity is banned,” and the desire, “never completely successful, to deny this melancholy.”

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Laura Raskin is a writer and editor based in New York and has been covering architecture, design, and urbanism for a decade. She was previously an editor at Architectural Record magazine and her writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Review, Metropolis, Curbed, Places, and others. She received an M.A. in journalism from Columbia University.

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Discover More from Design New York >

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Recommended Reading

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Rhythm King: Peter Voulkos and 'Black Bulerias' >

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Vladimir Kagan: A Life in Design >

\n","publishDate","2020-12-02T20:13:37.000000Z","authorCredit","Sarah Bochicchio","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/67338743/gino-sarfatti-lighting-design-new-york-auction","displayOrder",4,"auctionEditorialID",1103,"editorialID",3330,"flocklerID",67338743,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/glendale-f1e39ff7-7d34-4c72-8e08-1d0914e9bcbb_s600x0.jpg","Glenn Adamson examines one of the most important and monumental works by Peter Voulkos, made during the artist’s breakthrough years.","Rhythm King: Peter Voulkos and 'Black Bulerias'","

Peter Voulkos in his Glendale Blvd. studio with Black Bulerias in the background, 1958. © Pier S. Voulkos and Daniel R. Peters Trust, Photography by Rose Slivka. Courtesy of the Voulkos & Co. Catalogue Project.

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Written by Glenn Adamson

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Imagine you are Peter Voulkos in 1958. Here is what is on your mind. First and always, the landscape of Montana, where you were born and raised: the sublime power of that terrain, the drama of the cragged mountains and the passes cutting through. Second, the potential of clay as a sculptural medium, which you have been thinking about constantly—not abandoning your hard-won potter’s skills, but redeploying them in wholly unconventional ways. Third, an ever-enlarging constellation of artists, among them Pablo Picasso, Fritz Wotruba, and Franz Kline, as well as the more immediate energies of the Los Angeles scene (notably, the gang at the experimental Ferus Gallery, now in its first year of programming). Fourth, the new possibilities of scale afforded by your new Glendale Boulevard studio, with its oversized kilns, which you share with a fellow artist, John Mason. The architectonic quality of Mason’s work is itself a fifth element—a level of ambition for you to match, blow for blow.

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Peter Voulkos, Black Bulerias, 1958. Estimate $600,000-800,000. Design New York.

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Now imagine you want to combine all of these disparate influences into a single artwork. And, finally, that you succeed. This is Black Bulerias. All of Voulkos’ ambitions are present in this powerful work: geological force, medium-specific innovation, monumentality, sculptural intelligence, and structural complexity. Its importance derives partly from the circumstances of its making. In 1958, the artist was just arriving at the summit of his career—a short period that lasted only for another two years, when he was obliged to leave Los Angeles behind to teach in Berkeley. While he did continue to make ceramics in the Bay Area, alongside a new body of work in bronze sculpture, never again would he achieve the combination of scale and experimentalism that he did in these few years. Black Bulerias is one of very few major examples from this period that has remained in private hands, and has an extraordinary provenance to boot. Voulkos clearly considered it one of his most significant works; it was one of three that he sent to the 1959 Paris Biennale, where he won the Rodin Museum Prize, and was also included in his one-man exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1958-59, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1960.

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Black Bulerias installed at the Pasadena Art Museum, 1958. © Pier S. Voulkos and Daniel R. Peters Trust, Courtesy of the Voulkos & Co. Catalogue Project.

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Despite the historical gravitas of Black Bulerias, its physical mass, and the sheer willpower that Voulkos brought to making it, the composition also feels—the only word for it—playful. This quality is signaled in the title, appropriated from the vocabulary of flamenco guitar music, which he studied avidly (the bulería is a fast dance form, described as “bustling, happy and cheerful”). The sculpture rises from its two rounded haunches into a tumble of forms, an upward avalanche. It culminates in two craggy outcroppings, suggestive of fists raised in joy or triumph. The sculpture is marvelously changeable; as one circles around it, its interplay of positive and negative space develops into a muscular, propulsive rhythm.Despite its singular significance in Voulkos’ oeuvre, Black Bulerias does fit into a group of related works by the artist. In hindsight, it is also possible to see how it fits into a longer creative sequence. The immediate context for the work includes several other significant works, among them 5000 Feet (now at LACMA), Burnt Smog (also known as Funiculated Smog, in the collection at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater), Rasgeado (not to be confused with the earlier work of that title, now in a private collection), Black Butte Divide (Norton Simon Museum of Art), and Flying Black (also private collection). While none of these have quite the presence or complexity of Black Bulerias, all are executed in a similar idiom, made in stoneware with a dark slip or glaze, and built out of discrete volumes which are quasi-integrated into a fragmentary form.

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Peter Voulkos, Black Bulerias, 1958. Estimate $600,000-800,000. Design New York.

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The effect of these works was aptly described by Gerald Nordland in a rapturous review of Voulkos’ Pasadena Art Museum exhibition: “one considers the pot-like nature of the material and begins to feel vaguely with the weight, the suggestion of a figure which never emerges...The individual forms grow together and apart, creating spatial tensions and balancing each other in a personal exploration of the exuberance of sculptural form.”¹ As Nordland acknowledges in this passage, the technical basis for this group of sculptures—despite their groundbreaking character—is still the lexicon of pottery. Each component of Black Bulerias is made from wheel-thrown and slab elements, and is more or less vessel-sized. Voulkos had been experimenting with altered pot forms for a couple of years already; his breakthrough at this moment was to realize that these components could be reconceived as building blocks, opening a whole new sculptural vocabulary.

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Peter Voulkos, Black Bulerias, 1958 (detail). Estimate $600,000-800,000. Design New York.

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Over the subsequent decade, Voulkos would redeploy this modular approach in several different ways. A series of great masterworks he produced in 1958-1959, including Rondena (sold at Phillips in 2017), Sitting Bull (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and Little Big Horn (Oakland Museum of California), are built in much the same way, with the exterior unified into an envelope. This topological surface then serves as a canvas for expressionist painting, in conversation with the oils on canvas he was producing at the time (see: "Tower of Power"). He went on to apply the idea of unit-based construction to bronze sculpture; this adoption of a new medium is often understood as a rupture from his preceding ceramic work, but it was to some degree a logical extension. Finally, there are the Blackwares of 1967-68, which have a more evident relationship to functional ceramic typologies—plates, vases, jars—but feature the same dark palette and modularity he had pioneered a decade earlier.²

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Black Bulerias installed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1960. © Pier S. Voulkos and Daniel R. Peters Trust. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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Voulkos would never again be quite so generative again (though his later, wood-fired works do find many admirers). But during this short space of time—his breakthrough years—and especially in the key period from 1958 to 1960, he opened up the full possibilities of his medium for countless artists. These works have served as an essential framework of reference ever since.

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Peter Voulkos standing in front of Black Bulerias and other works exhibited at his solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1960. © Pier S. Voulkos and Daniel R. Peters Trust. Photography by Simpson Kalisher, courtesy the Voulkos & Co. Catalogue Project.

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To fully take the measure of Black Bulerias, then, we must see it not only as a triumphant milestone in Voulkos’ career. We should also see it as a site of convergence, in which several separate trajectories meet. In this respect, it is a fitting embodiment of the mountain landscape of his native Montana—which was compounded of primal forces beyond reckoning—and of Voulkos’ own studio, where numerous trains of thought collided to equally seismic effect. Black Bulerias has a duality that all great art works share in common. Perfectly, powerfully resolved in its own terms, it also points the way ahead.
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¹Gerald Nordland, “Art: Spokesmen for the Know-Nothings,” Frontier (May 1959), 22.
\n²Glenn Adamson, “Back to Black,” in Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years (New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2016.

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Glenn Adamson is an independent curator and writer based in New York.

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Discover More from Design New York >

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Recommended Reading

\n\n

Tower of Power: Peter Voulkos' 'Rondena' >

\n\n

Understanding Antti Lovag's Palais Bulles >

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\n","2020-11-16T22:56:57.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/66252473/peter-voulkos-new-york-auction-design",1054,3289,66252473,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/jason-jacques-phillips-6-e44bc44d-8b05-43e2-8433-9f804ec603e0_s600x0_c800x467_l0x271.jpg","'Arts du Feu: Works from the Collection of Jason Jacques,' a gathering of fin-de-siècle ceramics assembled over decades of assiduous pursuit, comes to market. ","Romancing the Clay","

George Ohr, Pot with Snakes, circa 1895. Estimate: $20,000-30,000. Design New York.

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Written by Glenn Adamson

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It’s a cherished scene in film history: Nigel Tufnel, as played by Christopher Guest, in the classic mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, 1984. Showing off his new amplifier, the guitarist proudly notes that its knobs go up to eleven—one higher than the traditional maximum. That’s how loud it is. Asked why ten on the knob couldn’t just be set a little louder, he stares blankly at the interviewer. Finally he replies, “These go to eleven.”

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Something of that spirit attends the present collection of French Art Nouveau ceramics from the collection of Jason Jacques. Probably the only major decorative art dealer who could be mistaken for a rock star, Jacques has spent his career going all in and then just that little bit further. He began some thirty years ago, with about four hundred dollars in his pocket, an eye for the extraordinary and a huge appetite for risk. As his business grew, he often bought objects he could not afford. His customer base was small, but intense. Curators respected his knowledge. Tastemakers like the interior designer Peter Marino were fascinated by his extreme aesthetic preferences. Somehow it all worked out. But as Jacques frankly admits, “It’s not practical, what I’ve done. I’ve always been in it for the romance.”

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Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat, Monumental Vase, circa 1900. Estimate: $15,000-20,000. Design New York.

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Around 2010, Jacques began branching into contemporary ceramics, beginning with the mercurial British genius Gareth Mason, then swiftly building an international roster. As his Upper East Side gallery became the premier setting for this material in New York City, he still showed his older material, but it gradually became less and less of an emphasis. In effect, he became a contemporary art dealer specializing in clay, who also had a private collection of antique ceramics. Now he is making it official: getting out of the vintage trade entirely, so he can concentrate on living artists. “This is an opportunity to rob me of my life’s work,” he jokes, and he’s not wrong. Little in the present auction has been seen in public (apart from a few short-run displays in his gallery) for at least a decade; it is a gathering of French fin de siècle ceramics the like of which will not be seen again, outside the walls of a museum.

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Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat, Large Vase, circa 1895. Estimate: $8,000-12,000. Design New York.

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Even so, this material may require some explanation. It’s evident on first glance that the objects are fantastical, with their lavish glazes and organic forms. What may be less obvious is their seminal role in setting the course of modern aesthetics. The one American among them, George Ohr, gives an indication of this historic trajectory. He has become celebrated as a singular genius, whose facility and daring led him to anticipate by decades the expressive breakthroughs made by such figures as Peter Voulkos and Ken Price. When the Museum of Modern Art reopened to much fanfare a year ago, they placed Ohr’s ceramics right in the first gallery; their undulating forms seemed to dance responsively to those in Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings.

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Ernest Chaplet, Pair of Monumental Vases, circa 1900. Estimate: $20,000-30,000. Design New York.

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Placing the “Mad Potter of Biloxi” alongside his French contemporaries provides a missing link—helping us see that Ohr was not quite as unique as one might think. This takes nothing away from his achievement; indeed, it may help us to appreciate it all the more, for he lacked the rich creative context that existed in France. Both Taxile Doat and Ernest Chaplet, for example, created things that were every bit as adventurous as Ohr’s; but they had the benefit of long experience in the ceramic industry, including at the storied manufactory Sèvres, before setting up their own ateliers. This exposed them to a level of scientific understanding that was unprecedented anytime, anywhere. French chemists and engineers (who were among the world’s most advanced at the time) had undertaken in-depth collaborations with factories, advising on clay bodies, glaze formulae, and kiln technology. In what Jacques describes as a “trickle down economy,” this knowledge flowed into independent studios, assuming material expression in the spectacular glazes that coursed over the contours of art pottery.

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Installation of Behind the Curtain: Treasures from the Vault exhibition at Jason Jacques Gallery, 2018. Image courtesy of Jason Jacques Gallery.

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In this respect, the French ceramists had a great advantage over all their contemporaries, even those in East Asia—though in other respects, they upheld those traditions as highly superior, and worthy of emulation. Long before the British potter Bernard Leach declared that the “Sung Standard” was one to which all should aspire, masters of grand feu (high-fire) ceramics like Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat adopted Chinese forms and glazes as models. They first learned through imitation, then developed the ideas further, in some cases arguably surpassing their sources of inspiration. A good example in the present sale is Daplayrat’s version of a meiping, perhaps the most classic of all Chinese ceramic forms, traditionally used to display plum blossoms. His treatment of the graceful silhouette is sheathed with a volcanic glaze, which also takes its inspiration from Chinese precedent—the rich oxblood red that so many European and American potters sought to copy—but has a gorgeous, saturnine depth all its own.

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Installation of The Bizarre Genius of the Teplitz Kunstkeramik Workshops exhibition at Jason Jacques Gallery, 2015. Image courtesy of Jason Jacques Gallery.

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The other Asian current that informed art nouveau was, of course, Japonisme. Siegfried Bing, whose Paris gallery bequeathed its name to the style, dealt in antiquities from Japan, and also published an influential magazine entitled Le Japon Artistique from 1888 to 1891. This transmission of global aesthetics has been a particular interest for Jacques throughout his career; in 2010, he created an ambitious exhibition and publication, Exotica, largely devoted to tracing it. Japonisme affected many European arts at this time, but was certainly nowhere more strongly felt than in ceramics. Just as the French potters began by copying the Chinese, and eventually departed from their example, they first sought to imitate superficial aspects of Japanese objects—the asymmetry and irregularity of tea ceremony wares, for example. Eventually, however, they embraced the fundamental principles of Japanese design rather than just its external appearance.

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Ernest Bussière, 'Chardon' Vase, circa 1903. Estimate: $6,000-8,000. Design New York.

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A perfect example in the present sale is the vase by Ernest Bussière, which doesn’t look particularly Asian in style, but employs the idea of abstracting nature, with which Japanese art was so rightly associated. It sensuous, overlapping lines and its palette are inspired by the tender heart of an artichoke. The upward climb of the design, particularly its delicate, semi-engaged handles, evoke the principle of organic growth. Bussière worked in Nancy, France close to the famed glass designer Émile Gallé, who employed similar motifs in his work; it is impossible to fully understand the work of Americans like Adelaide Alsop Robineau (who trained with Taxile Doat) and Louis Comfort Tiffany, or companies like Teco and Grueby, without knowing about these important precedents.

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Taxile Doat, 'La Musique et la Danse' Bottle and Stopper, 1903. Estimate: $12,000-18,000. Design New York.

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Nor are the connections all that difficult to trace. French art pottery was frequently included in the many World’s Fairs that punctuated the fin de siècle era—notably at Chicago in 1893 and Paris in 1900. The visitors who thronged to such events, among whom of course were artists and designers themselves, were utterly captivated by the grand feu ceramics on display. And so the tide of influence rippled onward, Americans taking their cues from the French, just as the French had been inspired by the Chinese and Japanese.

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Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat and Alphonse Voisin-Delacroix, Vase with Crabs, circa 1893. Estimate: $10,000-15,000. Design New York.

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In this sense, perhaps it is appropriate that so many of these stellar objects came to rest in the hands of an American. Now they will be dispersed again—intriguingly enough, at a moment when artist-designed ceramics are once again all the rage. Go to any of the major contemporary art fairs nowadays—in some respects, the successors to the international expositions of a century ago—and you will see artist designed ceramics in profusion. (Here again Jacques was a pioneer, presenting an all-clay booth at Frieze New York in 2017.) We seem to have rediscovered a basic truth about the medium: ceramics combines the color and gesture of painting with the volume and tactility of sculpture. The art potters of France knew this well, and they exploited the possibilities to the fullest. It’s far too simplistic to evaluate art history in quantitative terms, as if it were a competition. But if one were, for some reason, to assign a score to the ceramics seen here, it would be an eleven out of ten. At least.

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Glenn Adamson is an independent curator and writer based in New York.

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Discover More from Design New York >

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\n\n

Recommended Reading

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Rhythm King: Peter Voulkos and 'Black Bulerias' >

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Sculptural Extension: Lucio Fontana and Osvaldo Borsani’s Wall-mounted Console >

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\n","2020-11-17T21:38:21.000000Z",46,63,"https://www.phillips.com/article/66313161/jason-jacques-new-york-design-auction",2,1055,3291,66313161,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/kagan-sofa-715c1c1d-5be7-40e1-b9a1-5449ffb7a77b_s600x0.jpg","Suzanne Slesin explores the mid-century designer's most iconic works—from a reimagined milking stool to his famous unicorn table.","Vladimir Kagan: A Life in Design","

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Written by Suzanne Slesin

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There is hardly a survey on the history of mid-century furniture design that does not include the work of Vladimir Kagan, the talented, debonair, and prolific designer who died in 2016 at the age of 88. Often, Kagan is contextualized with such contemporaries as Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Edward Wormley, George Nelson, and Harvey Probber. Many of these now also illustrious names made their early reputations either on the West Coast, where a generation of modern architects was setting out to build the perfect houses in which to showcase their designs, or in the center of the United States where such companies as Herman Miller, Knoll, and Dunbar were mass-producing new pieces that would furnish homes and offices across the country. But Kagan occupied a unique place in the era. He was a New Yorker and his early works—many of which, especially today, are considered his most desirable—are closely linked to the time he spent in the city.

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The library of Vladimir Kagan and Erica Wilson, featuring the unique coffee table and Tri-symmetric stool included in the present collection. Photograph by Bob Hiemstra.

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In full disclosure, I had met Kagan long before I wrote about him in the 1980s for the Home section of The New York Times. His mother was a friend of my mother’s as they both had apartments in the same building in Palm Beach, Florida, and my husband, Michael Steinberg, reintroduced Kagan’s signature Serpentine sofa at Furniture of the 20th Century’s Chelsea showroom.

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But none of these points of connection prepared me for the surprise I received about 18 years ago. It was soon after I had embarked on the adventure of starting a small independent publishing house that a hefty single-spaced manuscript landed in my in-box. The story that Kagan had written about his life and career was as convoluted as it was fascinating. The memoir encompassed many of the subjects in which I was not only interested, but some of which resonated with my own background as a first generation child of immigrants who had fled Europe and landed in New York.

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Vladimir Kagan, Unique coffee table, circa 1952. Estimate: $10,000-15,000. Design New York.

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His parents and his younger sister had survived a dramatic escape from the Nazis and found refuge with relatives in New Jersey and the Bronx. Furniture making was already part of the family’s legacy from the Old World. Vladimir’s German maternal grandfather had had a fashionable and successful shop that specialized in introducing what he described as “peasant art, furnishings, and costumes into the staid old Munich society.” The family was not pleased with the beautiful young Hildegarde’s infatuation with Illi Kagan, a Russian, who, although he was the son of a trader in skins, had more modern ideas, including the dream of being a sculptor. The marriage celebration in 1926 took place in the basement of the groom’s furniture and cabinetry shop in Worms, Germany, where he had decided to stay after World War I.

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The two, seemingly opposite attitudes towards furniture making—the attachment to traditional crafts and the tug toward modernism and abstraction—would coalesce years later when father and son would work together in Manhattan.

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Vladimir Kagan, L-shaped “Swan-Back” sofa, model no. 507, circa 1955. Estimate: $10,000-15,000. Design New York.

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From a young age, Vladimir Kagan was an artist and his early sketches and close observations of nature were to become a design source for the rest of his career. “I collected and drew leaves with their delicate veining,” he recalled. “I was fascinated by the naked trees, their powerful trunks, the growth pattern of the branches, and the delicacy of their twigs.” It was the designer’s first lesson in what he called “nature’s engineering” and one that would later be translated into his sculptural furniture designs.

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After joining his father at their factory on East End Avenue Kagan turned the essence of his father’s overscale, abstract, and organic sculptures into more functional table bases and chair frames. “I wanted to create a piece of sculpture,” he said, “and saw no reason why a chair could not have the same derivative spark.”

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Vladimir Kagan, Table lamp, model no. 2030, circa 1951. Estimate: $4,000-6,000. Design New York.

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The first Kagan workrooms were on Manhattan’s then-gritty East Side, when elevated trains lumbered up Third Avenue, and furniture makers and other small manufacturers, along with slaughterhouses, filled the blocks by the East River. Kagan was constantly learning and absorbing—from the minimalist designs to which he was drawn by his initial fantasy of becoming an architect, to the Bauhaus, which was revered by his father. But he was also inspired by the purity in the work of such Scandinavian designers as Finn Juhl and Hans Wegner—in contrast to his contemporaries’ sleeker, and sometimes more functional, industrial designs.

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There was often a push and pull between minimalism and what seems like the nearly magnetic attraction to the sinuous and sensual lines and details Kagan saw in a leaf, an animal’s hoof, or a woman’s form. Curvaceous sofas, which represent some of his most prescient designs, he would explain, emerged from his observation of the human body, and the female torso in particular. He studied anatomy so that the chairs and sofas would take into account the potential sitter’s spine and provide lumbar support—before ergonomics became a catchword.

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Vladimir Kagan, “Tri-symmetric” stool, model no. 504, circa 1955. Estimate: $4,000-6,000. Design New York.

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Injected into this rather serious way of working and Kagan’s constant search for innovation were his infectious joie de vivre, his irrepressible sense of humor, and his enjoyment of it all along the way. Kagan would also encourage mosaic and ceramic artists to incorporate their own works—from glass tiles to pottery—into his furniture pieces. And ceramicists, jewelry designers, and painters such as Rose Krebs, Mark Kiram, Alexandra Kasuba, and Francisco Rebajes soon saw their artistry appear on lamp bases, coffee-table tops, and cabinet fronts.

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Kagan likewise reimagined the three-legged milking stool, a primitive piece of folk art furniture that his grandfather had collected, into the extraordinary cast aluminum and leather-covered Tri-symmetric stool, model no. 504, from around 1955. That was quite a leap. But one that was pure Kagan.

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Vladimir Kagan, “Contour” rocking chair, model no. 175F, with embroidery executed by Erica Wilson, circa 1955. Estimate: $10,000-15,000. Design New York.

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By 1950, and with the financial help of Hugo Dreyfuss, a retired textile manufacturer, Kagan was able to open the Kagan-Dreyfuss showroom on fashionable East 57th Street. The partnership would last for 10 years. Dreyfuss’ nubbly and textural fabrics, usually in neutral shades, became the favorite choice for his contoured sofas. Kagan began showing his furniture in the residential settings that drew well-heeled and celebrity clients to visualize how their own homes could be transformed with the purchase of such avant-garde pieces.

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But the life of the popular bachelor around town took an interesting detour when he fell in love with embroidery designer Erica Wilson, whom he described as a “lithe young Englishwoman who towered half a head above me when we danced,” after meeting her at costume party where she was dressed as a black poodle. They married in 1957. Wilson offered Kagan yet another source for collaboration—the association of her colorful needlepoint works to his more straightforward designs. When the Contour rocking chair, first introduced around 1955, was overlaid with Wilson’s exuberantly embroidered flowers, it took on a unique appearance.

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Vladimir Kagan, Prototype “Unicorn” table base, circa 1957. Estimate: $18,000-24,000. Design New York.

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Crafts, art, sculpture, and modern technology were never at odds in Kagan’s pieces. Rather, they became symbiotic partners in his freewheeling yet surprisingly down-to-earth designs. Kagan loved to explore and push boundaries, and still keep a steady hand on the business side of his enterprises. He never stopped reinventing himself and his furniture—creating collections for major manufacturers, designing ambitious corporate interiors, and exploring new materials, from cast aluminum to Lucite. A walk in the woods, a trip abroad, or a visit to a museum all offered him new inspirations. For example, Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space at the Museum of Modern Art in New York would be translated into the base of Kagan’s 1957 Unicorn table. Whether crafted in smooth wood or cast in shiny aluminum, the form remains one of its creator’s most admired pieces and one that defines not only a life in design but also a remarkable era in American creativity.

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Suzanne Slesin is the publisher and editorial director of Pointed Leaf Press.

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\nDiscover More from Design New York >

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Recommended Reading

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Rhythm King: Peter Voulkos and 'Black Bulerias'>

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\n","2020-11-18T17:21:06.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/66367365/vladimir-kagan-new-york-design-auction",1,1053,3292,66367365,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/2020_fa_ny_design_install-172-8af27ec0-bcf8-4438-be3e-b913175e52e0_s600x0.jpg","Join us for a virtual walkthrough of our Design auction from 1 Hampton Road. On view: Gio Ponti, Stilnovo, Peter Voulkos, Max Ingrand, Hans J. Wegner, and more. ","VR Walkthrough: Design","

Travel through our galleries at 1 Hampton Road in Southampton and browse our upcoming Design auction.

\n\n

Featuring leading pieces from the most sought-after designers of the 20th and 21st centuries, our Design Sale is comprised of works by Gio Ponti, Ico Parisi, Marc Newson, Max Ingrand, Pietro Chiesa, Peter Voulkos, Gino Sarfatti, Vladimir Kagan, and more.

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Our Design auction preview is on view through 8 December at our Southampton gallery, located at 1 Hampton Road, ahead of the 9 December auction.

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42

Franco Albini and Franca Helg

Rare sofa

Full-Cataloguing

Franco Albini and Franca Helg