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Mid-Century Modern from Sam Kaufman

Tags:: Furniture

Mid-century modern specialist Sam Kaufman presents some of his favorite artworks and furnishings that are currently for sale inside his intimate gallery space in Los Angeles. Here he explains the history of each piece, and outlines just what it is that makes each one so special.

Prouvé's "Chaise en Bois" was an all-wood version of his famous steel "Standard Chair". Because the exigencies of world war made supplies of steel unobtainable in 1942, Prouvé redesigned the chair to use as little metal as possible (the eight screws are the only parts fashioned from strategically precious material). The switch from steel to wood gave Prouvé an opportunity to experiment with traditional furniture-making methods that were paradoxically new to him, the machine-age avant-garde. Lovely through-tenons conspicuously join the wooden elements in four places. Though consistent with the modernist ethic of structural honesty, such labor-intensive joinery links Prouvé to the craftsmen of an older era, that of his father Victor Prouvé. While made of wood (in this case beech), this war-time iteration of the "Chaise Standard" retains Prouvé's signature rear leg that emphatically expresses the structural loads of the chair. Thus the distinctive profile, no less confidently architectural than the pilotis of a Le Corbusier building. $3,800.