Wood can be bent into a vast range of configurations, making it a graceful and economical choice for furniture styles from the Biedermeier to the Bauhaus. This remarkably pliant material was also the stuff of broad transformations in aesthetics, design, manufacturing, and marketing. Furnishings by the Viennese companies Gebruder Thonet and Jacob &amp; Josef Kohn tell the history of Modernism, from the Biedermeier era, Victorian eclecticism, the Secession and Art Nouveau to the 1930s International Style. Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, and Adolf Loos were among the avant-garde architects who created designs in bentwood; Modernist visionaries like Le Corbusier celebrated early Thonet chairs for their purity of form. From the innovations of a German cabinetmaker to an international conglomerate with over ten thousand workers, the evolution of bentwood furniture encapsulates the industrial revolution itself. Against the Grain: Bentwood Furniture from the Collection of Fern and Manfred Steinfeld documents The Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition of an important private collection, with essays by three notable scholars and a catalog section of seventy-five duotone reproductions. Art Institute curator Ghenete Zelleke outlines the stylistic transformations of bentwood furniture between the 1850s and the 1920s, discussing consumer taste in the development of furniture forms and the impact of historical shifts and aesthetic reform. Eva B. Ottillinger examines both the technical developments that led to industrialization and the marketing strategies that enabled mass consumption. Nina Stritzler discusses Thonet after 1922 as a leader in tubular-steel furniture by such architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and assesses the impact of industrial design and the corporate style on post-World War furniture. Seventy-five excellent bentwood examples from the Steinfeld collection are illustrated in this catalog, with entries by Ghenete Zelleke. Against the Grain also includes a preface by the collector and an appendix with eighty black-and-white reproductions of other pieces of furniture in the collection.

Against the Grain: Bentwood Furniture from the Collection of Fern and Manfred Steinfeld

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Zelleke, Ghenete

Ottillinger, Eva B.

Stritzler-Levine, Nina

Art Institute Of Chicago

Antiques & Collectibles

Art Inst of Chicago Museum Shop

Adolf Loos held that a building should have a soberly discreet exterior, reserving all its riches for its interior. Given that, any real appreciation of the spatial complexity of the work of one of the most misunderstood architects of the twentieth century requires engagement with his interiors, which this book does, brilliantly. In marked contrast to his contemporaries in the Vienna Secession, who designed their spaces down to the smallest detail, Loos presented himself as a “professor of interior design,” perfectly willing to adapt to the habits and tastes of his clients, inviting them to embrace their own tastelessness rather than defer to the discernment of an “aesthete” architect. Together with the future occupant, he designed welcoming interiors whose warmth came from the effective use of quality materials and the creation of a flowing continuity articulated by the furnishings. What Loos created thereby was not merely architecture, but a new culture of living.

Adolf Loos: Private Spaces

Arts & Photography

Colomina, Beatriz

Lahuerta, Juan José

Parcerisas, Pilar

Long, Christopher

Kristan, Markus

Kühn, Christian

History & Criticism

Tenov Books

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