Bauhaus B35 Chair by Marcel Breuer for Thonet, 1930s

This design icon from 1928, the B35 armchair, was designed by Marcel Breuer in the late 1920s and made by the German Thonet factory in the early 1930s. This piece is made of tubular steel and black leather with natural patina. The materials used and the traces of wear show that this is an early production of this timeless modell. The armrests are finished with solid wood. Following the success of his Wassily chair, Breuer continued to experiment with tubular steel furniture. Like the Wassily chair, the B35 was not a direct representative of the Bauhaus school, but is clearly in line with the Bauhaus design and construction principles, with a modern, stripped-down form made of industrial materials not used today in furniture production.

Marcel Breuer was born in 1902 in Hungary. He was an architect and designer. He received a scholarship to study painting and sculpture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1920, but quickly quit and applied to the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany. After completing the preliminary courses there, he studied at the Bauhaus furniture workshop in 1921-1924. He then conducted a furniture workshop in Dessau where he created the first tubular steel armchair (1925-1926), presented in 1927 as the Type B3 Steel Club Chair, later renamed Wassily in honor of the Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky. As his career developed, he began to focus more on architectural designs. In addition to steel tube furniture and plywood elements. Breuer designed over seventy private homes and many university and office buildings. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a traveling exhibition of his works. In 1953 he designed the UNESCO headquarters in Paris with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfulss, and in 1963 he designed the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Thonet is the oldest existing furniture company in the world. It began its long business in 1819 when the carpenter Michael Thonet founded a furniture workshop in Boppard, Germany. A supporter of the Biedermeier style, he specialized in chairs, tables and cabinets characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation and an emphasis on the principles of functionalism. In the 1930s, Thonet’s experiments with glued and steam-bent wood furniture, such as his famous Boppard chair (1836), brought international acclaim. Thonet’s projects achieved lightness, durability and comfort unprecedented in European furniture at that time. The iconic works of the Thonet collection include: rocking chair No. 1 (1860), cafe chair No. 14 (c. 1859), chair of the Adolf Loos cafe museum (1899), chair No. 209 (c. 1900), Otto Wagner’s chair No. 247 (1904) and Josef Hoffmann’s No. 811 (1925). In the early 1920s, Gebrüder Thonet also began producing bent tubular steel designs by Bauhaus masters such as Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam.

The armchair is in original vintage condition. It has natural patina on the leather, minor scrapes and scratches. The seat is 34 cm high.