Arne Jacobsen SJacobsen 1958Jacobsen EggJacobsen DesignedJacobsen ChairsJacobsen StyleJacobsensWallcolorEggsForwardthe iconic Egg chair by Arne Jacobsen. Designed in 1958 but destined to be modern foreverContinuing from Part 1, in this installment I'll take a look at three creations which, although mostly derivative of Aarnio's Ball, also delivered some potentially useful improvements. As Isaac Newton and Noel Gallagher both recognized, there's nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants. Not everything can be an unprecedented breakthrough, and there is often good value in incrementally improving and refining other people's ideas (as opposed to just blindly copying them). This simple variation on Aarnio's sphere isn't quite an oval, as its name would imply, but more of an egg. Indeed, its full name is Ovalia Egg Chair. Danish designer Henrik Thor-Larsen unveiled it at the Scandinavian Furniture Fair in 1968, with production continuing until 1978. The asymmetric egg shape, at least to my eyes, gives off an atomic 50s vibe, as opposed to the more streamlined shapes associated with late 60s space-age furniture.
The egg encloses the human form more tightly and has less overall volume than Aarnio's design, thus reducing the cost of materials but potentially creating problems for extreme claustrophobics. As with a lot of other mid-century furniture, it wasn't until the millennium (and its appearance in a couple of well-known movies) that mainstream interest in Ovalia revived sufficiently to justify bringing it back into production. That renewed interest also resulted in the deployment of an official web site with lots of photos and background information. The concept of an egg-shaped chair was frequently copied by other companies during the 1970s. The best-known variations, usually including integrated speakers and even interior lamps, were the Alpha Chamber (AKA Sound Chamber AKA Stereo Egg Chair) by Lee West, and the Egg Sound Chair by Starkey Laboratories. This extreme reinterpretation of Aarnio's design was a one-off brainchild from the multi-talented Victor Lukens. It was first displayed to the public in 1970 in the Contemplation Environments exhibition at Manhattan's Museum of Contemporary Crafts.
Lukens, bankrolled by his family's steel empire, was an eccentric visionary, with expertise in diverse disciplines including architecture, photography, film, art, race cars, and furniture design. He designed not just the pictured chair, but also the entire contents and layout of his apartment. Quoting from the Space Age Habitations section of Underground Interiors by Norma Skurka: The metallic bubble chair works like a one-way mirror. From the outside it reflects the images of the room and, in fact, the opening where one enters the chair is not readily seen. But once inside, with legs curled up within the bubble, the sitter can survey the scene invisibly because the walls of the metallic bubble are transparent from within. The polished chrome finish was undeniably beautiful and futuristic, but it could also feel like a fairground hall-of-mirrors. As Time magazine put it: Victor Lukens' reflective plastic chair tends to disorient rather than put its occupant at ease.
The chair's one-way mirror functionality, as described by Skurka, also begs an obvious question. Under what scenario would Lukens (or anyoner else) want to hide themselves from view while spying on what other people were doing inside the same room ? Back in the last century (late 1999 to be precise), I ended up renting a 1-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles in order to fulfill some work commitments. Although the living room was relatively small, I was (somewhat naively) determined to build a full-fledged home theater rig around a unique pod couch manufactured by Krypton Furniture in nearby Riverside. I had mounted an extremely heavy projector on the wall so amateurishly that there was an overwhelming probability that it would crash to the ground during the next earthquake. But surprisingly, although the mount kept drifting and had to be adjusted periodically, it never collapsed, and the whole rig performed above expectations for the two years during which I lived in Los Angeles.
The attached picture testifies to the precarious-yet-overachieving arrangement. More interestingly, the extra width of the pod proved itself to be a superior solution for interaction in social situations. It fitted up to three people, albeit in a slightly cramped way, and the uncomfortable isolation typical in ball or egg chairs was nonexistent. The extra wide field of view also eliminated any claustrophobia for the inside occupants, while allowing conversation with people outside the pod at a variety of angles. The pod couch also included two built-in speakers, which were used to deliver the two rear channels from my amplifier's surround output. The pod's walls blocked out all sound at right angles, so having speakers inside the unit was an essential requirement for watching movies or TV with full 5.1 audio. I still own that Krypton pod couch (as well as their fantabulous but seemingly no-longer-made AristoCouch). But unfortunately, given the personally verified benefits of a wider pod design, there aren't too many choices on the market if you're looking to seat more than one person.
In fact, the only other such couch I'm aware of is Home Sweet Home, pictured right. It was designed by Uli Schmid and Christian Olufemi in 1996, and is manufactured by the German company Cous. Its design is beautifully simple and modern, but it doesn't seem to include speakers, which creates a potential problem in terms of usage with audiovisual material. The bottom line is that chairs and couches are tools meant to solve human problems, as opposed to works of art to be displayed for their own sake. Different tools should be used for different purposes, and it pays to think beforehand about how a tool is going to be used before splurging a load of cash on a very expensive piece of furniture. In the next installment, I'll wrap up the series by taking a look at a couple of bodysnatchers that tried to give their users a bit more flexibility under varying conditions.Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world. Newly discovered sketches suggest that Vincent van Gogh cut off his entire ear as opposed to just part of it.
The drawings, which were made by the artist’s physician Dr. Felix Ray, were discovered by Bernadette Murphy in a Californian archive. Shepard Fairey “stylized” Jonathan Bachman’s viral photograph of protester Ieshia Evans at a Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge. The NYPD placed the Jack Shainman Gallery on “special alert” following threats made in response to its display of Dread Scott’s flag “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday” (2015). A cross-party group of British MPs (members of parliament) introduced a bill for the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. The Human Rights Foundation stripped Pyotr Pavlensky of the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent after the artist expressed support for the Primorye Partisans. The German parliament passed the Cultural Property Protection Law. The controversial legislation, which seeks to tackle illegal antiquities trafficking, faced significant opposition from art dealers and collectors.
Sotheby’s will host a three-part sale of David Bowie‘s art collection in November. The collection includes works by Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Frank Auerbach, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Harold Gilman, and Damien Hirst. Over 30 books on Wassily Kandinsky from the Guggenheim Museum’s Library were digitized and made available on the Getty Museum’s website. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced that it will install 12 mosaic portraits by Chuck Close at the new Second Avenue and 86th Street stop. Deborah Thorpe, a research fellow at the University of York, concluded that the marginalia in a medieval manuscript held at the University of Pennsylvania includes doodles made by children. Thorpe’s findings were published in the Cogent Arts and Humanities journal. The June 4th Museum, the Hong Kong institution dedicated to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, closed. According to the New York Times, the museum’s operators claimed to have suffered “continued legal harassment” from the corporation that owns the building.
Canadian art thief John Tillman was granted full parole after serving just over two years of a nine year prison sentence. Malaysian photographer Keow Wee Loong claimed to have snuck into Fukushima. The photographer posted a number of images of abandoned stores and homes on his Facebook page. The city remans heavily radiated following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Brooke Shields assisted artist Will Kurtz in reconstructing one of his sculptures after part of it was accidentally thrown away by cleaners at the Art Southampton fair. The $8,000 sculpture, which is entitled “Keep America Great Again,” depicts a raccoon standing beside an overflowing trash can. The National Gallery of Canada acquired Charles Meynier’s “Wisdom Defending Youth from the Arrows of Love” (1810). The Walker Art Center received a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired eight paintings by Aboriginal artists — a promised gift from the collection of Robert Kaplan and Margaret Levi.
The Autry Museum of the American West acquired the estate of artist Harry Fonseca (1946–2006). London’s National Portrait Gallery acquired the earliest known portrait of a British architect. The University of Texas at Austin acquired Marc Quinn’s monumental sculpture, “Spiral of the Galaxy” (2013). The Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired 39 prints produced at the Gemini G.E.L. workshop. The Nationalmuseum acquired an Ovalia egg chair designed by Henrik Thor-Larsen. The Irish Museum of Modern Art partnered with cognac producer Hennessy to establish a fund for the acquisition of works by artists not already represented in the museum’s permanent collection. The George Eastman Museum purchased the only known box of Kodak Film manufactured for the Kodak camera (1888), as well as one of three known boxes of Kodak Transparent Film (introduced in 1889). Theresa May appointed Karen Bradley as the UK’s culture secretary. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, appointed Justine Simons as his deputy mayor for culture and creative industries.
Eric Shiner, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum, will join Sotheby’s fine art division as senior vice president. Agustín Arteaga was appointed director of the Dallas Museum of Art. Niels Van Tomme was appointed director of the de Appel Arts Center. Terry Nicholson was appointed interim director and CEO of Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s Fabergé collection will go back on display in newly renovated galleries on October 22. The ARoS Aarhus Art Museum will launch the first ARoS Triennial in June 2017. Luce Lebart was appointed the first director of the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada. Jay Wegman will leave his post as artistic director of the Abrons Art Center to become the senior director of NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Stephen Barker was appointed dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine. Polydoros Karyofyllis (aka Poka-Yio) will succeed Xenia Kalpaktsoglou as director of the Athens Biennial.
Halona Norton-Westbrook was appointed director of collections at the Toledo Museum of Art. Christopher Maxwell was appointed curator of European glass at the Corning Museum of Glass. Helena Newman was named chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. Marie Chouinard was appointed dance director for the Venice Biennale. Chouinard will serve a four-year term between 2017 and 2020. Rhéanne Chartrand was named the McMaster Museum of Art’s inaugural Aboriginal curatorial resident. New York Central Art Supply will permanently close by the end of the Summer. The business has operated in the same building since 1905. London’s Seventeen gallery will open a space at 214 Bowery. London’s Timothy Taylor gallery plans to open a New York space named Timothy Taylor 16 x 34. David Zwirner gallery plans to open an outpost in Hong Kong next year. Oliver Laric is now represented by Metro Pictures [via press release]. Siglio Press will move its operations from Los Angeles to the Hudson Valley in New York.
Christian Marclay was awarded SFMOMA’s 2016 Contemporary Vision Award. Julius von Bismarck was awarded the city of Wolfburg’s 2017 Art Prize. Sissel Marie Tonn was awarded the 2016 Theodora Niemeijer Prize [via press release]. David Saunders was awarded the inaugural Getty Rothschild Fellowship. Socrates Sculpture Park announced the recipients of its 2016 Emerging Artist Fellowships. The New York Foundation for the Arts announced the recipients and finalists of its 2016 Artists’ Fellowship Program. Héctor Babenco (1946–2016), film director. Best known for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985). Frank Dickens (1931–2016), cartoonist and creator of “Bristow.” Mollie Evans (1922–2016), antiques dealer. Don Friedman (1935–2016), jazz pianist. David Graebe (1937–2016), organ case designer. Owen Holder (1921–2016), playwright and actor. William H. McNeill (1917–2016), historian. Author of The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963).