Neoclassicism predominated in France till the rise of Napoleon, when to Roman styles were added Egyptian motifs from his Egyptian campaign of 1798. This was known in France as the Empire style, after the First Empire of France (1804–14), and in England as Regency, for the period (1811–20) when George III was too deranged to rule. Furniture design, for the most part light and graceful during the early part of the Neoclassical period in France, had become more consciously luxurious as the Revolution was approached. During the Empire period it became massive, imposing, dark, and pompous. The usual vocabulary of classical ornament is to be found in both Empire and Regency, with some modifications from earlier times. The cabriole leg of the Rococo style became straight, and curves tended to disappear in all furniture. Symmetry of ornament replaced the asymmetrical curves. In England, in the latter part of the 18th century, porcelain became less and less fashionable, and its place was taken by the cream-coloured earthenware (creamware) of Josiah Wedgwood, and by his jasper and basaltes stonewares, all admirably adapted to the new style. Greek vase-shapes and classical ornament were commonly used in the decoration of Wedgwood wares of all kinds. In England, the work of Thomas Hope, a wealthy amateur architect, gained much attention through the publication of his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807). He enlarged and decorated his London home in Duchess Street, Portland Place, and also his country house, Deepdene, in Dorking, Surrey, with somewhat heavy and pedantic design that was at variance with the general trend of the time but influenced later work. This volume tells this fascinating story, combining the history of modern design movements with a chronological review of 80 top designers, from Otto Wagner at the end of the 19th century to Jasper Morrison, a young designer making an impact today. In between you'll find profiles of some of the most influential creative minds of the 20th century, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Eero Saarinen, and many others. The book is as beautiful to look at as it is exciting to read. It contains more than 580 full-color photos covering a wide range of objects that include furniture, glass, ceramics, metalware, industrial products, and household appliances. For anyone loving the 20th century design movements, this book truly is a must-have.

Originally from the Netherlands, Berlin-based industrial designer Hella Jongerius is famous for her belief in “long-termism” and is outspoken about the fact that “there’s too much shit design” in the world today. Her work is typically known for mixing traditional craft techniques with modern technologies. Jongerius set up her first studio – Jongeriuslab ¬– in Rotterdam in 1993, where she mixed independent projects with work for major clients such as airline KLM and the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York. Since 2012, she has served as art director for rug company Danskina, as well as being art director of colours and materials for Vitra since 2007. Recent projects include a major exhibition at the Design Museum in London, which looked at the designer’s research into the possibilities of colour. Wassily Chair, designed by Marcel Breuer around 1925. Sold for €510 via Henry’s Auktionshaus (August 2022). Swiss designers also brought tremendous vitality to graphic design during this period. After studying in Paris with Fernand Léger and assisting Cassandre on poster projects, Herbert Matter returned to his native Switzerland, where from 1932 to 1936 he designed posters for the Swiss Tourist Board, using his own photographs as source material. He employed the techniques of photomontage and collage in his posters, as well as dynamic scale changes, large close-up images, extreme high and low viewpoints, and very tight cropping of images. Matter carefully integrated type and photographs into a total design. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18112 Openlibrary_editionArt and design are both influenced by the politics, rise of technology, and the atmosphere of various periods. The produced pieces, poster works, or even the innovations of typography are all linked to the thoughts and challenges the various societies face. The economical, social, political, and cultural factors need to be understood as guides which help designers produce pieces which communicate with its public. Understanding aspects of the history of design assists us not only in the analyzing of both the historical and contemporary context but as an inspiration for future designers as well. The reference to the past and some of its revolutionary ideas gives depth to the piece. At times, the past may be on purposely challenged by new and progressive thoughts that are in constant demand. A tan leather and chromed Butterfly chair after a design by Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Hardoy. Sold for R6,000 via Strauss & Co (June 2022). urn:lcp:designof20thcent0000fiel:epub:29d96ea8-7a58-448b-bbdb-c81c23dc72cc Foldoutcount 0 Identifier designof20thcent0000fiel Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t18m5pt2n Invoice 1652 Isbn 9783836541060

In addition to such aesthetic, commercial, and corporate purposes, graphic design also played an important political role in the early 20th century, as seen in posters and other graphic propaganda produced during World War I. Colour printing had advanced to a high level, and governments used poster designs to raise funds for the war effort, encourage productivity at home, present negative images of the enemy, encourage enlistment in the armed forces, and shore up citizens’ morale. Plakatstil was used for many Axis posters, while the Allies primarily used magazine illustrators versed in realistic narrative images for their own propaganda posters. The contrast between these two approaches can be seen in a comparison of German designer Gipkens’s poster for an exhibition of captured Allied aircraft with American illustrator James Montgomery Flagg’s army recruiting poster (both 1917). Gipkens expressed his subject through signs and symbols reduced to flat colour planes within a unified visual composition. In contrast, Flagg used bold lettering and naturalistic portraiture of an allegorical person appealing directly to the potential recruit. The difference between these two posters signifies the larger contrast between graphic design on the two continents at the time. Modernist experiments between the world wars One of the giants of graphic design in the US, Paula Scher has been a partner at Pentagram’s New York office since 1991. Her big break came in the mid-1990s though, with her landmark, typography-led identity for The Public Theatre. Scher has gone on to create identities for brands ranging from Citbank to Tiffany & Co, and her teaching career includes over two decades at the School of Visual Arts, along with positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the Tyler School of Art. She has served on the board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), as well as being awarded its highest honour – the AIGA Medal – in 2001. Scher has also been the subject of various books and films, including a monograph published by Unit Editions, and a Netflix documentary on the “art of design” in 2017.

Morag Myerscough (1963-present)

urn:lcp:designof20thcent0000fiel_l0m1:epub:45a7e136-3f66-44b5-915f-ad9ec907d010 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier designof20thcent0000fiel_l0m1 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1wf2qb9w Invoice 1652 Isbn 3822870390 The 19th century was an age of eclecticism. Decorators introduced the custom of having a different style for each room—“Gothic,” “Elizabethan,” or “Old English” for the dining-room; “Queen Anne,” “Chippendale,” or “Louis XVI” for the drawing-room; with pseudo-Elizabethan furniture for the library. Design reached its nadir with the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London, the low-water mark in the history of European taste in interior decoration, from which there was no conceivable direction except upward. Every truly original idea — every innovation in design, every new application of materials, every technical invention for furniture — seems to find its most important expression in a chair” Artist-turned-furniture designer and architect Eileen Gray is arguably one of the most underrated designers of the 20th century. It was only really later in life that she received recognition for her classic designs such as the leather and tubular steel Bibendum Chair and the E-1027 glass and tubular steel table. Born in the Irish market town of Enniscorthy, Gray spent her childhood in London and was among the first women to be admitted to the Slade, where she took up painting in 1898 before doing an apprenticeship in a London lacquer workshop. After opening her own gallery in 1922 in Paris, she moved into furniture and worked closely with many of the outstanding figures of the modern movement, including Le Corbusier and J.J.P Oud. Gray later moved into architecture, again encouraged by Le Corbusier and J.J.P Oud. She designed two houses in the Alpes Maritimes, one at Roquebrune which was built from 1926-1929, and the other at Castellar, built from 1932-1934. After World War Two, and right up to her death in 1976, she continued to work as a designer on major projects such as the Cultural and Social Centre. Today, her work is rightly preserved as part of the archives at major, international institutions such as the V&A and MoMa. Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) Photo by Paul Gutmann, Archives Charlotte Perriand (courtesy of Cassina)

Charlotte J. Fiell (born 1965) studied at the British Institute, Florence and at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London, where she received a BA (Hons) in the History of Drawing and Printmaking with Material Science. She later trained with Sothby's Educational Studies, also in London. Together the Fiells run a design consultancy in London specializing in the sale, acquisition, study and promotion of design artefacts. They have lectured widely, curated a number of exhibitions and written numerous articles and books on design and designers, including Taschen's Charles Rennie Macintosh, William Morris, 1000 Chairs, Design of the 20th Century and Industrial Design A-Z. They have also edited the six-volume Decorative Art series published by Taschen GmbH By the latter part of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was slowly developing, particularly in England, and machinery was increasingly producing many objects of interior decoration, modifying their form to suit the new methods and reducing the price to make them available to new markets, a situation envisaged by Wedgwood. The less affluent of the middle classes became the largest section of consumers, and manufacture was increasingly directed toward catering to their tastes. In the early years of the 19th century a new concept was beginning to take shape—the notion of eclecticism, which propounded that any style was as good as another. This led to the idea that styles could legitimately be mixed together. In this way Horace Walpole’s nightmare of a garden-seat—Gothic at one end and Chinese at the other—became, in principle, an accomplished fact: one firm, for instance, made a classical urn on a Gothic base.

Louis XIV Chair

Some innovations are heralded as turning points for civilization. The wheel propelled us great distances, the combustion engine transformed lives, and the television transported us to imagined lands. The chair doesn’t tend to receive quite the same status, despite literally lifting humans off the ground. But what started as something purely utilitarian has morphed into a beacon of design in the 20 th century. The marriage of form and function has made the chair an increasingly popular collector’s piece, with one even hailed as the best design of the 20 th century.

For a short course in modern design, Design of the 20th Century may be all you need. The curator-authors have made perfect, compact sense of a freewheeling century and the figures who defined its styles." Chairs like these stand apart as impeccable mixes of practicality and aesthetics. They ensure that the sitter or fan can enjoy the benefits of quality design, and turn the everyday act of sitting into an art. To help you do the same, we have collated 25 of the Most Famous Chair Designs of All Time to help you ease into luxurious, sophisticated, and engineered refinement. In France, where there was a sounder tradition and Gothic had not been influential for centuries, 19th century taste was not quite so debased as in England. A light and amusing version of Gothic known as the Troubadour style made its appearance in the 1830s, perhaps an international tribute to the contemporary fame of Sir Walter Scott. Rococo was revived as the Pompadour style, and there was a neo-Renaissance period, with furniture designs based on 16th-century Italian work. On the whole, the furniture of the second empire (1852–70) was very acceptable in design, although these pieces were based largely on the 18th century; these styles harmonized well with the contemporaneous music of Jacques Offenbach and the brilliance of the court of Napoleon III. Originally designed by Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy in Buenos Aires in 1938, it was Knoll Associates who acquired US production rights of the stretched fabric chair and made it famous worldwide when it was featured in their eponymous catalogue from 1947 to 1951. It’s so popular that it has a range of imitators and is also known as the Hardoy Chair, Safari Chair, and Wing Chair. Keep that in mind when searching Invaluable for it. Superstar designers like Charles and Ray Eames have ensured that taking the weight off can be done in elegant, luxurious style, along with a host of other designers. These include the likes of Vernor Panton, Eero Saarinen, and Hans Wegner.By the 1830s there was a revival of Rococo, to be seen in the porcelain of the period and the chairs of John Belter of New York, and there was something called the “Louis XIV” style, which that monarch would have found difficulty in recognizing. Throughout this period there was a limited amount of pseudo-Chinese decoration, principally on pottery and porcelain and papier-mâché. After 1853, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the U.S. Navy reopened Japan to Western trade and influence, a new kind of Japanese art began to be exported, such as the vases of unprecedented ugliness decorated in Tokyo and called Satsuma, or enormous, grossly over-decorated vases from Seto in Owari (presently Aichi Prefecture), none of which would have found a buyer in the Japanese home-market. From the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, to the Le Corbusier Grand Confort and the Arne Jacobsen Egg Chair, the evolution of the coveted chair – a chair that goes beyond mere function – has gathered significant pace over the past century. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-06-15 13:04:32 Associated-names Fiell, Peter Boxid IA1829809 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier