Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - Design London Wednesday, April 25, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private collection, Switzerland, circa 1931
    Private collection, Switzerland, 1972
    Acquired from the above, 2008

  • Literature

    Alexander Von Vegesack and Matthias Kries, eds., Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Design in Stuttgart, Barcelona, Brno, exh. cat., Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, 1998,
    for an excerpt from a Bamberg Metallwerkstätten brochure dated 1931, p. 34, for an experimental model on p. 96 fig. 14
    Christiane Lange, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & Lilly Reich: Möbel und Räume, Krefeld, 2006, pp. 164–65, no. 22
    Helmut Reuter and Birgit Schulte, eds., Mies and Modern Living: Interiors, Furniture, Photography, Ostfildern, 2008, p. 57 fig. 49, for technical drawings on p. 125 fig. 125 and
    p. 200 fig. 202, for an excerpt from a Bamberg Metallwerkstätten brochure dated 1931 on p. 160 fig. 163, p. 164 fig. 167, p. 165 fig. 168, p. 169 fig. 168, p. 168 fig. 173, p. 169 fig. 174

  • Catalogue Essay

    The present chairs correspond to model MR 60/4 in the 1931 Bamberg Metallwerkstätten sales catalogue and in Mies van der Rohe’s petty patent no. 1151444 dated 5 November 1930. A series of graphite drawings (circa 1930) depicting this model are in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The same model with dark leather cushions was photographed circa 1931 by Walter Peterhans in Mies’s apartment at the Bauhaus Dessau. Other examples in paler leather, and one in what appears to be black leather, were photographed in 1931 in Mies’s model house at the Berliner Bauausstellung.

    The present chairs bear the same provenance as Lot 95, an MR 150/3 low table bearing a Bamberg Metallwerkstätten manufacturer’s label. The chairs and table were acquired by the present owner from private Swiss collectors who resided in a house designed circa 1929 by Luise ‘Lux’ Guyer (1894–1955), a prominent Swiss architect active in Zurich and among the first women architects to open her own practice in that country. Those previous owners had in turn purchased the house and its contents, including the present three lots, in 1972 from the original occupants of the house.

96

Early pair of ‘Tugendhat’ cantilever chairs, model no. MR 60/4, possibly

produced by Berliner Metallgewerbe Josef Müller or Bambergcirca Metallwerkstätten, Berlin 1929-30
Chrome-plated flat steel, leather, rubber straps (2).
Each: 80.7 x 76.2 x 75 cm (31 3/4 x 30 x 29 1/2 in)

Estimate
£60,000 - 90,000 

Design

26 April 2012
London