A rare Kem Weber chair shows, the European side of American modernism

Magazine Antiques, May, 2008 by Martin Filler

But as Waddell points out, Weber notwith-standing,

I am doing a very different collection in a sense. Whereas my earlier interest was in Machine Age and industrially produced material, mainly from the 1930s, now I'm trying to take it back to the advent of modernism in America--'26, '27, and '28. The more I get into it, the more I'm finding how key works from those three crucial years reflect the influence of their designers' countries of origin, before the dominance of American-born thirties industrial designers like Norman Bel Geddes [1893-1958], Henry Dreyfuss [1904-1972], and Walter Dorwin Teague [1883-1960].

When Waddell first told me he believed his new Weber chair might well be the missing link between the Wiener Werkstatte and American modernism, I was a tad skeptical. But the minute I laid eyes on the piece, I knew exactly what he meant. Its upright stance does speak to direct Central European influences, recalling such earlier dining room chairs as the ones Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) designed for the 1905 Purkersdorf Sanatorium in Vienna.

Weber, born in Berlin and apprenticed to a royal cabinetmaker in Potsdam, eventually settled in Los Angeles and became the West Coast equivalent of Paul Frankl, the New York furniture designer whose Skyscraper line was a highlight of American modernism. (1) Weber is now best remembered for his Airline armchair of 1934-1935, a slouchy, streamlined wood-and-naugahyde design that brings to mind the aerodynamic seating of the first commercial airplanes. (Waddell's example is now in the Metropolitan Museum). But Weber's earlier commission for the J. C. Friedman house, built in 1928 in Banning, California, a desert town twenty miles from Palm Springs, had resulted in a very different kind of chair.

Well before Waddell's epiphany at Modernism, he had seen pictures of the Friedman house dining room in period publications, although those black-and-white images did not hint at Weber's striking color scheme (see Fig. 1). Four of the six dining chairs mysteriously appeared in a Palm Springs junk shop in 2006, where the unattributed pieces were snapped up by a savvy picker who quickly flipped them to Loughrey after showing him the historical photographs. The chairs' high backs--composed of five broad horizontal slats of lightly stained blond wood--convey the informality of folding garden furniture. The backs are outlined with thinner framing strips of black-stained wood, the vertical members of which continue downward past the seat to become the two back legs.

FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Rather than conventionally positioned arms, the chairs have lower than usual rests--handgrips, actually--contained within a continuous curve of black-stained wood that wraps around the seat back, and steps down in ziggurat-like right angles to form the two front legs. It is hard to imagine a more skillfully resolved design than this, in which no element is left incomplete or abandoned after a quick theatrical effect is accomplished--a failing of so much art deco design. (I use that term advisedly: for years, the ever-precise Waddell has chafed against the misnomer "art deco" to describe what he insists must be termed "American modern" design, restricting the French term to works made in that country after the eponymous Exposition International des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 in Paris, much as some scholars of nineteenth-century design now prefer "American classical" to the old solecism of "American Empire.")