One of the very first exhibitions organized by the gallery known at the time as R 20th Century, Ilmari Tapiovaara, Interior Architect opened on March 27th, 2001, at 82 Franklin Street. It was accompanied by a catalogue edited by Lily Kane, featuring an essay by the Finnish design historian Pekka Korvenmaa and an introduction by Ilmari's son Timo Tapiovaara. The exhibition was based on a collection of furniture acquired from Tapiovaara's estate in the previous year. It was supplemented with several extremely rare chairs which Evan and Zesty purchased from New York private dealers which came with the tantalizing and completely feasible (but never confirmed) provenance of MoMA's Low Cost Furniture Competition of 1948. The exhibition was a success, one of the building blocks of the gallery's history of producing original scholarship on historical design. Several years later, the gallery acquired a second tranche of furniture from the Estate. But as the years passed, and the gallery became famous for its focus on American design and craft, Brazilian design, and began representing contemporary makers, the Tapiovaara collection gathered dust in the warehouse.
When I joined the gallery in 2016, we were getting ready to expand to our new building on 64 White Street. The opening exhibition R & Company: 20 Years of Discovery included several of the finest examples of Tapiovaara left in the collection, which at the time weren't for sale. We placed a Domus Deluxe chair from the Estate in the collection of LACMA, where it was on display in their Scandinavian Design in the United States exhibition. But otherwise, in the twenty years since acquiring the second batch of works from Timo Tapiovaara, nothing has been shown. It was starting to get ridiculous, and thus we arrived at the decision to part with every single piece, from the iconic to the obscure. Without a doubt, several of the works presented here are museum quality, and embodied with the spirit of the designer, who used them in his studio. It is our hope that private collectors of the old school, perhaps even another museum or two, might emerge from the woodwork, tempted by the low reserves, and add something really special to their holdings.
—James Zemaitis
Ilmari Tapiovaara 1914–1999
Often described as the designer who captured the essence of modern Finnish identity, Ilmari Tapiovaara made significant contributions to design in the post-war era. The architect and furniture designer admired the ideological beliefs of Alvar Aalto bringing functional design to everyone regardless of socioeconomic status. His high quality, but affordable work draws inspiration from the handicraftsmanship of traditional Finnish farmhouses most often created in birch wood. He designed furniture with the whole environment in mind including the architecture that surrounded it.
Tapiovaara came from a creative family—his grandfather a skilled carpenter, his older brothers Tapio a successful visual artist, and Nyrki a film director. At age 20 he enrolled in the Department of Furniture Design at the Central School of Applied Arts in Helsinki later graduating 1937. For a short time, he worked as an assistant in the office of Le Corbusier in Parisbefore returning to Finland, where he worked as an artistic director and designer for the country’s largest furniture manufacturer Asko Oy. His first designs were destroyed by bombings during the war and never produced.
Auction Results Ilmari Tapiovaara
