The Wassily Chair Was Never Kandinsky's

In 1925 Walter Gropius made Marcel Breuer a junior master at the Bauhaus and put him in charge of the furniture workshop. Breuer was in his early twenties. That same year, as the story is usually told, he bought his first bicycle and could not get over how light its steel frame was. Within about a year he had turned the observation into a chair.

A Student From Pécs

Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary, on May 21, 1902. In 1920 he took up a scholarship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and abandoned it the same year for the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, where he went through Johannes Itten's preliminary course and then landed in the carpentry workshop. His early pieces were wood, all right angles and slats. He passed his journeyman's exam in 1924. A year later he was running the shop.

Our history of the Bauhaus covers the school's move from Weimar to Dessau. What matters here is that Breuer arrived in the new building with the authority to experiment and an interest in a material nobody had put in a living room.

The Bicycle, as Told

The Wikipedia entry for the Wassily chair, which leans on the Cooper Hewitt in New York, says Breuer was struck by the lightness of his new bicycle's tubular frame. Some versions name the bike, some zoom in on the handlebars, and the details shift depending on who is telling it. Treat it as the origin myth it has become. The sturdier fact is that Breuer took the idea of a tube frame from bicycles and borrowed fabrication methods from local plumbers, who already knew how to bend pipe.

The result, designed over 1925 and 1926, is the club chair later catalogued as the B3. Look at it side on and it is close to a line drawing. A continuous run of steel tube traces the outline of a big upholstered club chair, and then the upholstery disappears. In its place are taut straps of Eisengarn, a waxed cotton "iron yarn" invented in the 19th century, for the seat, back and arms. Margaretha Reichardt, a student in the Bauhaus weaving workshop, improved the thread and developed the cloth and strapping. It is a club chair with the club removed.

The Bauhaus Kooperation biography of Breuer calls it the first tubular steel chair for domestic use. Steel tube was a material for bicycles and plumbing. Putting it next to the fireplace was cold and slightly shocking, and in the right room it still is.

Never Kandinsky's Chair

Wassily Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus while Breuer ran the furniture workshop. He admired the finished chair, and Breuer made a duplicate for his quarters. That is the entire connection. The chair was not designed for him, and for most of its first four decades it did not carry his name.

The early production history is messier than any catalog suggests. In 1926 or 1927 Breuer co-founded Standard-Möbel in Berlin with Kálmán Lengyel, and the company produced most of his early designs under license. The club chair was the one significant early Breuer design it did not offer. Thonet made it instead, from the late 1920s, as Model B3, in folding and non-folding versions with fabric straps tensioned by springs. That Thonet edition was discontinued during World War II and is now the rarest version of the chair.

Breuer left the Bauhaus in 1928 and opened an architecture office in Berlin. He moved his office to Budapest in 1933, to England in 1935 and in 1937 to the United States, where Gropius helped him into a professorship at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He moved his office to New York in 1946 and spent the rest of his career as a serious architect, with the Whitney Museum of American Art and the UNESCO building in Paris among the major commissions. The chair could easily have stayed a footnote.

Gavina Gives It a Name

It didn't, because of Dino Gavina, a Bolognese furniture entrepreneur who wanted the Bauhaus armchair back in production. Breuer was alive and working in New York, so this was a living designer's piece coming back, not an estate reissue. Gavina took the license after the war and introduced the version most people picture, with black leather straps in place of fabric. While researching the chair's origins, the company found the Kandinsky story and named the chair after him. The B3 became the Wassily, and it has been mass-produced since the 1960s.

Knoll bought the Gavina Group of Bologna in 1968, which brought Breuer's designs into its catalog, and it has made the Wassily ever since. That puts it in the same small club as the Eames Lounge Chair, a piece of furniture people can name on sight. The patents expired long ago, so copies are everywhere. Knoll holds the Wassily name, which is why reproductions are sold under other ones.

Why It Still Works

A lot of modernist furniture looks great in a photograph and asks something of you in person. The Wassily asks less than you would expect. The leather slings give, the back tilts you slightly, and the open frame means the chair barely registers visually even though its footprint is generous. In a small apartment it makes the room look bigger, which is not something you can say about most club chairs.

It is also the clearest early case of industrial design aimed at the home, and its influence went to odd places. In 1934 Peter Bang designed the Hyperbo radio-gramophone with a frame inspired by Breuer's tubular steel chair, a story told in our Bang & Olufsen history. Decades later Verner Panton chased the idea of a chair drawn in one continuous gesture, only in molded plastic, and our piece on the Panton Chair picks up that thread. More from the school and its heirs lives in our design section.

Breuer died in New York on July 1, 1981. The chair he designed in his early twenties carries the first name of a painter who simply liked it.