B5 chair

* Nearly 20,000 images of artworks the museum believes to be in the public domain are available to download on this site. Other images may be protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights. By using any of these images you agree to LACMA's Terms of Use.

B5 chair

1926-1927
Furnishings; Furniture
Steel, Eisengarn fabric
34 × 18 1/2 × 18 1/2 in. (86.36 × 46.99 × 46.99 cm)
Gift of Graham Steele and Ulysses de Santi​ in honor of Maja Hoffmann​ through the 2018 Decorative Arts and Design Acquisitions Committee (DA²) (M.2018.113)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

...
The geometric simplicity of Marcel Breuer’s B5 side chair makes it a quintessential example of Bauhaus design. Breuer became interested in tubular metal as a material for furniture after observing its strength and durability on the bicycle that he rode around the Bauhaus, the avant-garde German art school where in the 1920s, he studied and then taught. The B5 chair demonstrates Breuer’s mastery of orthogonal form while preserving subtle visual detail, such as the parallel front stretchers and rhyming handle and seat. Its simple geometries of a cubic base and perpendicular planes of fabric show how Breuer simplified the chair to its barest minimum. This example retains its original Eisengarn fabric, a specially developed, ultra-durable, waxed cotton. It was one of four designs Breuer developed in the mid-1920s from tubular steel, and appeared in the Breuer-furnished dining room of Erwin Piscator, a German theater director and member of the German avant-garde (a related version was designed for the home and atelier of László Moholy-Nagy). The chair was first produced by the Berlin firm Standard-Möbel, which Breuer co-founded (this chair is from that brief period). When that firm was sold to the Thonet company in 1929, production continued and the chair remained in demand for decades. Bobbye Tigerman, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator, Decorative Arts and Design, 2018
More...