Wright Auction

The first chair to be made of tubular steel, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair is widely regarded as one of the most significant furniture designs of the twentieth century. Breuer, who was at the time a Master at the Bauhaus, devised the chair taking inspiration from the frame of his bicycle, and its sharp angles and industrial materials indeed evoke the mechanical. Breuer worked with a local plumber to weld together lengths of steel tube for his early prototype, but later versions would be bolted together instead. The chair’s adherence to a cube form shows the influence of the era’s de Stijl movement, as well as the constructivism espoused by Breuer’s fellow Bauhaus member Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Officially the Club chair, model B3, the design would become known as the “Wassily” in reference to Wassily Kandisky’s early praise of the design. As the Victoria & Albert Museum notes, “The intersecting lines and planes that make up the chair achieve one of the most-sought after characteristics of the Modern interior: visual transparency.”