46
Designer
Eliel Saarinen (American, born Finland, 1873 - 1950)American, born Finland, 1873 - 1950
Armchair
1907–1908
Oak, birch, ebony, mahogany, pewter, and replaced leather upholstery
42 1/2 × 22 3/4 × 21 1/2 in. (108 × 57.8 × 54.6 cm)
The American Institute of Architects, Houston Design Collection, museum purchase funded by the American Institute of Architects, Houston, the Mary Kathryn Lynch Kurtz Charitable Lead Trust, the estate of William F. Stern, by exchange, and Lynn Goode
2014.1113
ProvenanceCommissioned by August Keirkner (1856-1918) for the Keirkner apartment, Luotsikatu 1, Helsinki, 1907-1908; Transferred to Marmoripalatsi (The Marble Palace), Kaivopuisto, Helsinki, 1918; Lydia Keirkner 1918-1937, in The Marble Palace; Rudol Walden 1937-1946, in The Marble Palace; Inherited by Walden Family, 1926-2013, in The Marble Palace until 2012; [Modernity gallery, Stockholm, 2013]; Purchased by mark McDonald, New York, May 2014; purchased by MFAH, 2014.Other examples from the suite are in the collections of LACMA (armchair); Charles Price (armchair); private collector, London (6 side chairs and 2 armchairs). One armchair is currently on hold for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.
Eliel Saarinen is most remembered for his work in the United States and at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in particular. However, he worked as an architect and designer in his native Finland for nearly three decades before immigrating to America. Saarinen cofounded an architecture firm with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren in 1896 while the young men were still students at the Polytechnic Institute of Helsinki. The following year, they won first place in a competition to design the Tallberg Apartment Building, one of their first major commissions, and the trio quickly became the leading practitioners of modern architecture in Finland. Ten years later, although their partnership had since dissolved, Saarinen revisited the Tallberg project when it was purchased by the iron magnate August Keirkner, who hired Saarinen to redesign his personal residence within the building.1 Saarinen’s renovations encompassed the dining room, living room, library, and music room, and involved structural changes to the space as well as new interior design schemes executed in the Art and Crafts style of Finland known as Romantic Nationalism.
Saarinen’s designs for Keirkner’s apartment included a suite of Modernist dining chairs composed of six armchairs and eight side chairs. The highbacked oak dining chairs were stained green, a common practice among Arts and Crafts furniture designers, and featured a crown-like abstract design on top of the chair backs inlaid with birch, ebony, and mahogany. The chairs were originally upholstered in red leather, but the upholstery was replaced with green leather sometime in the mid-twentieth century.2 The armchairs are barrel-shaped, demonstrating the influence of the Arts and Crafts movements of England and Scotland, whose chair designs often incorporated barrel forms and flat planes of wood. Saarinen created variations of this chair form throughout his career, with the earliest known design dating from a drawing published in the Swedish language magazine Ateneum in 1901.3 He also used this form as the basis for the dining chairs he created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1929 exhibition The Architect and the Industrial Arts, as well as the chairs he designed for Cranbrook. —Sarah Marie Horne
Saarinen’s designs for Keirkner’s apartment included a suite of Modernist dining chairs composed of six armchairs and eight side chairs. The highbacked oak dining chairs were stained green, a common practice among Arts and Crafts furniture designers, and featured a crown-like abstract design on top of the chair backs inlaid with birch, ebony, and mahogany. The chairs were originally upholstered in red leather, but the upholstery was replaced with green leather sometime in the mid-twentieth century.2 The armchairs are barrel-shaped, demonstrating the influence of the Arts and Crafts movements of England and Scotland, whose chair designs often incorporated barrel forms and flat planes of wood. Saarinen created variations of this chair form throughout his career, with the earliest known design dating from a drawing published in the Swedish language magazine Ateneum in 1901.3 He also used this form as the basis for the dining chairs he created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1929 exhibition The Architect and the Industrial Arts, as well as the chairs he designed for Cranbrook. —Sarah Marie Horne
Notes
1. By 1907, Saarinen’s partnerships with Gesellius and Lindren had both dissolved. See Albert Christ-Janer and Alvar Aalto, Eliel Saarinen: Finnish-American Architect and Educator, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).2. It is uncertain when exactly the chairs were reupholstered. We do know that in 1916 Keirkner had them moved to the new residence that Saarinen had designed for him, the Marmoripalatsi (Marble Palace), and that the entire dining room suite of the Marmoripalatsi was replaced circa 1939 after it was purchased by Rudolf Walden. AT this time, the chairs from Keirkner’s apartment were moved to another location. See Johanna Luhtala and Markus Manninen, Marmoripalatsi: Rakennushistoriaselvitys (Helsinki: Arkkitehtitoimisto Schulman Oy, 2012).
3. See O. Donner, Jr., Axel Gallén, and Wentzel Hagelstam, Ateneum: internationell, illustrerad tidskrift för literatur, konst och spörsmål af allmänt intresse (Helsinki: Wentzel Hagelstams och Aktiebolaget F. Tilgmanns förlag, 1901).