4 Martin Stam for Thonet Cantilever Chairs and 2 Breuer & Stam Bauhaus Armchairs. Set of 2 Mid Century Model MG5 Centro Studio chairs by Mart Stam & Marcel Breuer for Matteo Grassi, made in the 1970s in Italy, and set of 4 chairs by Stam made in Germany in the 1960. Both sets made with leather and chrome-plated steel. 

Condition: Commensurate with age. 

Size: 19 x 26 x 32 1/2 in. 

Martinus Adrianus Stam (best known as Martin or Mart Stam) was born in Purmerend, The Netherlands on August 5th, 1899. He trained in Amsterdam at the National Standard School from 1917 and 1919, going to work as a draftsman with an architectural firm in Rotterdam afterwards. In 1920 Stam was imprisoned for refusing conscription during the First World War, and spent his incarceration drawing up new urban designs, particularly interested in figuring out how to best solve traffic flow issues. In 1922 he moved to Berlin, where his unusual style was lauded by Max Taut and referred to as New Objectivity. In 1924 Stam co-founded the magazine ABC Beiträge zum Bauen in Basel (Contributions on Building) with Russian avant garde architect El Lissitzky, taking over when Lissitzky had to move to Switzerland for treatment for tuberculosis. He also developed a steel-tube cantilever chair, leading to multiple variations produced by his associates and rivals, particularly Mies van der Rohe, who made models for Knoll Furniture in America, and Marcel Breuer, who he sued over the patent in German court. Despite winning, Stam later became a begrudging admirer of Breuer, and collaborated with him on other furniture and building designs in later years. In 1927 he became a founding member of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, and in 1930 he traveled with twenty other architects to the Soviet Union to create a string of new modernist cities in a group known as the May Brigade. He returned to the Netherlands in 1934, but growing political turmoil made it difficult to complete many of his projects. He became the director of the Institute for Applied Arts in 1939, using the position to help with the Dutch resistance, and eventually married a Jewish employee who he had helped into hiding. In 1948 he took a position in Dresden, East Germany to reorganize and combine the College for Applied Arts and the Academy for the Arts, advocating a new strict structure for the heavily destroyed urban landscape. Facing significant opposition from traditionalists, he left in 1950 to become the director of the Advanced Institute of Art in Berlin, but encountered resistance there too as a non-German. He ultimately returned to Amsterdam in 1953, by which time most of his ideas had been disregarded by modern architects and designers as “idealist pre-Cold War fantasies.” Frustrated and unable to find much success pushing for more expressionist architecture, he and his wife retired to Zurich, Switzerland in 1966 and completely withdrew from public life. He died on February 21st, 1986, virtually forgotten, but since the fall of the Soviet Union his contributions to the world of design have been more appreciated as his primary work behind the former Iron Curtain has been exposed to new audiences, showcasing the more elegant side of early Functionalism.

Marcel Lajos Breuer, commonly known to his friends and associates as Lajkó, was born on May 21st, 1902 in Pécs, Hungary to a Jewish family. He was later forced to renounce his faith in order to marry Marta Erps due to anti-Semitism in Germany at the time. Interested in art and design from a young age, Breuer studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, becoming one of the first and youngest students at the Bauhaus, a radical arts and crafts school that Walter Gropius had founded in Weimar just after the First World War. Gropius recognized his talent and became his mentor, quickly putting him at the head of the Bauhaus carpentry shop. After the school moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925 Breuer returned from a brief sojourn in Paris to join older faculty members such as Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee as a Master, eventually teaching in its newly established department of architecture. Repurposing bicycle handlebars led him to create immensely popular steel furniture like the Wassily Chair, which fully supported him for the rest of his time in Europe. In 1928 he opened a practice in Berlin and devoted himself fulltime to interior design and furniture design. In 1932 he built his first house, the Harnischmacher, in Wiesbaden. In 1935 Gropius convinced Breuer to relocate to London to escape the growing anti-semitism in Germany, where he was employed by Jack Pritchard at the Isokon company, one of the earliest proponents of modern design in the United Kingdom. Breuer designed his famous Long Chair as well as experimenting with bent and formed plywood, inspired by designs by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States to accept an appointment as chairman of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and along with Gropius he joined the faculty in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two men formed a partnership that influenced American designers for a whole generation, with students like Paul Rudolph, Eliot Noyes, I. M. Pei, Ulrich Franzen, John Johansen, and Philip Johnson. However, Breuer broke with Gropius in 1941 in order to make a name for himself, and moved to New York City in 1946 after marrying Gropius’ former secretary Constance Crocker Leighton. Together with Harry Seidler as his chief draftsman he established a practice that he maintained there for the rest of his life. His innovative designs, such as the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, the monastic Master Plan and Church of Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota, and the Whitney Museum of American Art on Manhattan’s Upper East Side became emblematic of shifting tastes in architecture, as well as leading Breuer to his preferential medium, concrete. Throughout the almost 30 years and nearly 100 buildings that followed, Breuer worked with a number of partners and associates with whom he openly and insistently shared design credit, and he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects at their 100th annual convention in 1968. He died in a Brutalist apartment he had designed and built himself on July 1st, 1981, and his partners kept offices going in his name in Paris and New York for several years until their eventual retirement, when the Breuer group closed for good.

Commensurate with age.