As an architect, designer, professor, and cofounder of both the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann had an outsized influence on the aesthetic development of a modern style from the end of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century. Having studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Carl von Hasenauer and Otto Wagner, Hoffmann was part of the Viennese avant-garde circle that also included Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Koloman Moser, and Joseph Maria Olbrich, as well as their wealthy patrons. He is credited with having designed more than five thousand objects in a variety of media for individual clients, the Wiener Werkstätte, and for industrial production for firms such as Jacob & Josef Kohn, a Vienna-based manufacturer of bentwood furniture.

 

When Hoffmann was asked by Gustav Siegel, the head of Kohn’s design department, to create furniture for the firm, he was already known for his rigorous aesthetics. Indeed, his design for the Sitzmaschine bears the hallmarks of his mature style with its rhythm of rectilinear forms, bent geometries, perforated squares and rectangles, and spheres that served as both decoration and structural support. The chair’s overall form is indebted to the earlier Adjustable Back Armchair (c. 1870) designed by the British architect Philip Speakman Webb for Morris & Co. (fig. 27.1). A great admirer of the British Arts and Crafts movement ethos and its architects and designers, Hoffmann was most definitely aware of the design, choosing to pare back its form to the barest of geometric essentials for his own version.

 

The Sitzmaschine’s adjustability and design date has led some scholars to surmise that the chair was used at Hoffmann’s Purkersdorf Sanatorium near Vienna. To date, however, no visual evidence supports that claim. The chair does, however, have significant affinities with Hoffmann’s architectural design of the sanatorium, specifically the windows. Featuring the same two rows of squares formed by mullions and transoms on the top half of each window, the geometric forms of the chair are also carried throughout the interior architecture.

 

The first photographic record of the Sitzmaschine is from an entry hall of a country house that Hoffmann designed and exhibited as part of J. & J. Kohn’s 1908 display at the Kunstschau exhibition in Vienna. Unfortunately, very few records of the factory’s production exist, but the few that do offer some clues as to the chair’s reception and availability during its 1905–16 production. Kohn’s 1912 furniture catalogue and price guide for the United States does not illustrate or list the Sitzmaschine.¹ Perhaps considered too avant-garde for American tastes, the Sitzmaschine and many other chairs designed by Hoffmann, Gustav Siegel, and Otto Wagner for Kohn at that time were also not featured in the catalogue. A 1916 Kohn trade catalogue for Austria and Germany, however, depicts two versions of the Sitzmaschine, the slightly smaller Model No. 669, which featured a caned seat and back, and Model No. 670, with loose cushions and pull-out footstool.² In addition to these variants, the Museum’s example has two color tones, an exceedingly rare finish of which only a small number of extant examples are known. —Cindi Strauss