Great seats

An eight-year old boy runs into the Royal Alberta Museum’s main gallery and shouts to his father, “Look. The Queen’s chair.”

Part of a classroom of curious children, he is touring RAM’s latest exhibition – The Art of Seating: 200 Years of American Design.

He points to Wenzel Friedrich’s bizarre 1890 Texas Longhorn design, an example of a chair made from repurposed material. Wenzel adapted steer’s horns using their natural curves to form the arms, legs and back.

The upper horns for the back are capped with ivory balls, while Tiffany glass balls form the chair’s lower feet and adorn the lower horns. The royal blue silk fabric covering the beautifully tufted seat gives off a whimsical, over-the-top boudoir vibe.

“Wenzel was a Bavarian cabinet maker, but he became a grocer in America. In dealing with butchers, he saw a great waste. Horns from steers were piling up. As a former cabinet maker, he knew how to work with wood and decided to recycle them,” said Cathy Roy, curator of Western Canadian history.

The Art of Seating is a touring exhibit organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Fla. This treasure trove features 43 chairs from the private collection of Dr. Diane Jacobsen, one of Florida’s foremost collectors of art.

The chairs reach back from the mid-1800s to works from today’s studio movement. Each iconic chair was not only chosen for its beauty and historical context, but also for the important social, economic, political and cultural influences that shaped them. En masse they tell a story of a nation’s evolution in the industrialized world.

When Jacobsen purchased the first chair more than eight years ago, she didn’t set out to develop a collection. Instead she became enamoured of the sculptural quality, the innovation and designs.

Just a quick glance at the exhibit reveals an admirable streak of American ingenuity, not only in design, but also in use of materials. Designers have built chairs from an abundance of materials such as natural wood, rushes, cane, wicker and cotton to manufactured pewter, iron, recycled cardboard and moulded fiberglass.

Up until the 19th century many chairs were hand-crafted. But a massive immigration boom to the United States largely fuelled industrialization of chairs.

“The population had grown too fast to rely on European hand-crafted chairs. In the United States there were not enough craftsmen to fill the needs,” Roy noted.

Every chair tells a story. Perhaps the most majestic and illustrious is the 1857 House of Representatives Chamber Chair designed by Thomas Ustick Walter. The architect of the capital from 1851 to 1865, the chair was created to be used in the halls of Congress and is showcased in portraits of political leaders including Abraham Lincoln.

Designed in the classical Roman style, the regal chair has petal-like legs, deeply carved laurel leaves and guilloche borders fashioned on intertwined ovals and circles.

The Industrial Revolution created a patent craze and the Centripetal Spring Arm Chair is an outstanding example of the designs that drove the patent push. Thomas E. Warren designed it circa 1850. It is basically a stationary seat on a base of eight iron springs arranged radially from a central post. This innovative designed allowed the sitter to move and rotate in any combination of directions. Warren patented this design and later used it for creating railroad car seats.

Like Warren, John Henry Belter’s design of the 1860 Slipper Chair took advantage of a new jigsaw he patented to efficiently cut the elaborately pieced back in a grapevine and oak design.

The 1875 Egyptian Revival Side Chair instead reflects societal and cultural influences on designs. At that time the Suez Canal had just opened and the ancient ruins of Egypt had gained exposure through Napoleon’s campaigns. The exotic motifs blend a carved, winged phoenix in profile and the wings of Osiris sitting on front legs carved as Egyptoid columns.

The earliest modern chair on display is Warren McArthur’s sling seat lounge chair designed in 1935. Using a simple canvas seat on a tubular aluminum frame, it suggests movement more common in contemporary furnishings.

Two architects, Frank Lloyd Wright’s circular 1938 Johnson Wax Company chair reflects the Art Deco Movement and Frank Gehry’s 1971 barstool introduces a fluid design.

Lovers of 20th century modern design will find inspiration in Vivian Beer’s one-of-a-kind blue steel chair, Harry Bertoia’s green diamond metal and cloth lounge chair, and Herbert von Thaden’s adjustable laminated lounge chair.

If anything, these last three examples reveal that designers are just starting to explore the wide world of possibilities.