Marcel Breuer
Hungarian-American Designer, Sculptor, and Architect
Movements and Styles: Bauhaus, Modern Architecture
Born: May 21, 1902 - Pecs, Hungary
Died: July 1, 1981 - New York City, USA
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"The artist works with the highest level of feeling. The technician works with the highest level of logic."
Summary of Marcel Breuer
His friends and family affectionately called him Lajkó, but the rest of us know him as Marcel Breuer, the Hungarian-American designer whose career touched nearly every aspect of three-dimensional design, from tiny utensils to the biggest buildings. Breuer moved quickly at the Bauhaus from student to teacher and then ultimately the head of his own firm. Best known for his iconic chair designs, Breuer often worked in tandem with other designers, developing a thriving global practice that eventually cemented his reputation as one of the most important architects of the modern age. Always the innovator, Breuer was eager to both test the newest advances in technology and to break with conventional forms, often with startling results.
Key Ideas
Marcel Breuer was born on May 21, 1902, in Pécs, Hungary, a small town near the Danube River. After graduating from high school at the Magyar Királyi Föreáliskola in Pecs, Breuer enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to study painting, where he had been offered a scholarship. He almost immediately disliked the program, however, and within weeks of joining, he left to begin an apprenticeship with a Viennese architect. Breuer was eager to work with his hands and joined the cabinetmaking studio of the architect's brother. At age 18, in 1921, he moved to Weimar, Germany, to enroll at a new school called the Bauhaus, founded in 1919 with a mission to marry functional design with the principles of fine art. Its head, the architect Walter Gropius, immediately recognized Breuer's talent and promoted him within a year to the head of the carpentry shop. At the Bauhaus, Breuer produced the furniture for Gropius' Sommerfeld House in Berlin as well as his acclaimed series of "African" and "Slatted" chairs. But he also became acquainted with many of the most important artists of this era, who likewise worked and taught at the Bauhaus, including Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers. Breuer later reflected that Klee served as one of his two greatest teachers in life, along with his high school geometry instructor.
Important Art by Marcel Breuer | |
  | Club chair (model B3) (1927-1928)Artwork description & Analysis: Made of leather and cantilevered steel, the Wassily chair has become one of the world's most enduring and iconic pieces of furniture. Breuer designed the chair at the age of the 23, while still an apprentice at the famed Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Inspired by the Constructivist principles of the De Stijl movement and the frame of a bicycle, the Wassily chair distills the type to its bare essentials, reflecting the Bauhaus' proclivity for functionality and simplicity. Breuer viewed the bicycle as an object that represented the paragon of design, owing in part to the fact that its form had remained largely unchanged since its inception. The tubular steel of the bicycle's handlebars also intrigued Breuer, as it was light, durable, and suitable for mass production (a manufacturer by the name Mannesman had recently perfected a type of seamless steel tubing that was capable of being bent without collapsing). Breuer once mused to a friend regarding the bicycle, "Did you ever see how they make those parts? How they bend those handlebars? You would be interested because they bend those steel tubes like macaroni." Breuer bent the steel components so that they were devoid of any weld points and could thus be chromed piecemeal and assembled. He named the chair after the painter Wassily Kandinsky, a professor at the Bauhaus, who was so enamored by the piece during a visit to Breuer's studio that Breuer fashioned a duplicate for Kandinsky's home. First mass-produced by Thonet, the license for manufacturing the chair was picked up after World War II by the Italian firm Gavina, which was in turn bought out by the American company Knoll in 1968. Knoll retains the design trademark and the chair remains in production today. - 28 1/4 x 30 3/4 x 28" (71.8 x 78.1 x 71.1 cm) |
 Artwork Images | Cesca Chair (c. 1928)Artwork description & Analysis: Shortly after finishing his design for the "Wassily" chair, Breuer continued his explorations of the plastic possibilities of tubular steel with the B32, or The Cesca Chair, as it is now popularly called. In this case, he molded the material into a single, snaking outline onto which he attached two beechwood frames covered in caning. The form of the frame - where the seat and back are supported only by the legs at the front - comprises the first cantilevered chair design in history, a feat only possible due to the seamless steel tubing that resists collapsing when bent. With ease, Breuer's design thus marries the traditional methods of craftsmanship - the woven caning hand-sewn into the wood frame - with the industrially mass-produced tubular steel. The chair takes its popular name from that of Breuer's daughter Francesca; the moniker was suggested by the Italian furniture manufacturer Dino Gavina, whose firm started making the Cesca (and the B3 Wassily chair) with Breuer's permission in the 1950s before being bought out by Knoll in 1968. Cane, Beechwood and Chromed Steel - 23.5 x 23.5 x 31 in. |
 Artwork Images | John Hagerty House (aka the Josephine Hagerty House) (1938)Artwork description & Analysis: Erected in 1938, on the Atlantic shores of Cohasset, Massachusetts, The Hagerty House represents the first commissioned architectural collaboration between Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer (they had previously worked together on Breuer's own Lincoln, Massachusetts home), and one of the first examples of International-Style architecture in the USA. The rectilinear structure uses an L-shaped plan, with the one-story longitudinal section running north to south and parallel to the coastline. The east side of the home features floor-to-ceiling windows intended to maximize the residents' views of the Atlantic Ocean, thereby blurring the distinction between interior and exterior space. In the words of John Hagerty, "The house was to be focused like a camera toward the magnificent expanse of ocean...blank walls would cut out the view of neighboring houses." The base and south wall, constructed from the site's granite, disclose their sensitivity to the rocky environment. The house thus appears as a prism partially nestled into and partially resting on top of the shoreline, creating a kind of belvedere for the ocean views. - Cohasset, Massachusetts |
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Content compiled and written by Nicholas Coyote
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Peter Clericuzio
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Nicholas Coyote
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Peter Clericuzio
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First published on 02 Sep 2016. Updated and modified regularly. 
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