Marcel Breuer

MARCEL BREUER (Hungary, 1902 - United States, 1981).
Set of four armchairs "Cesca".
Steel and rattan.
Slight wear and tear.
Measurements: 78 x 59 x 55 cm.

Breuer designed this chair for the first time in 1928. He first made the chair (without arms), and then the armchair, the model shown here. Originally known as B32, its revealing use of material and simple form with chrome-plated steel tubes made it an international icon, unparalleled until then. In the early 1960s, Italian modern furniture manufacturer Gavina Group acquired the rights to the design. The company's founder and owner, Dino Gavina, decided to rename the chair "the Cesca," after Breuer's daughter, Francesca. Cesca chairs were manufactured and distributed under the Stendig name between 1962 and 1968. And in 1968, Knoll acquired the Gavina Group and incorporated Breuer's designs.

Marcel Breuer was a Hungarian architect and designer, one of the leading masters of the Modern Movement, who was very interested in modular construction and simple forms. He studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar at the time when it was directed by Walter Gropius, and would later take charge of the furniture workshop of this school. There he designed the B3 chair, later known as the Wassily chair, made in 1925, the first tubular steel chair in history, which combined the flexible conditions of this material with its ease of large-scale industrial production. Breuer would continue at the Bauhaus until 1928, when he settled in Berlin to devote himself to architecture. However, with the rise of Nazism he had to leave Germany, because of his Jewish origin, and moved first to England in 1933, and later to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, from 1937. Today his furniture designs are part of the most important collections in the world, including the MoMA in New York and the Victoria & Albert in London.