LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  19 - 20TH CENTURY DESIGN ART  / 

68

KEM WEBER...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:15,000.00 - 20,000.00 USD
KEM WEBER...
KEM WEBER
A RARE ARMCHAIR, CA. 1929
FROM "THE KEM WEBER GROUP"
manufactured by Grand Rapids
Chair Company
"sage-green" painted wood, original leather upholstery
40 3/4 in. (103.5 cm) high <P>ESTIMATE: $15,000-20,000 <P>LITERATURE
CREATIVE ART, October 1930, pp. 252-253 The Art Institute of Chicago, "Shaping the Modern: American Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1917-1965," MUSEUM STUDIES, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2001, pp. 43 and 45 (the latter for an illustration of the chair model as part of a dining suite) <p>A student of Bruno Paul at the Academy of Applied Arts in Berlin, Karl Emanuel Martin Weber was stranded in California during World War I, where he had traveled to supervise the German pavilion in the 1915 San Francisco exposition. He moved to Los Angeles and became one of the earliest proponents of the "moderne" movement in California. After a stint designing furniture for Barker Brothers in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, Weber designed "The Kem Weber Group" for the Grand Rapids Chair Company, which included a dining table, arm and side chairs, serving table, sideboard and china cabinet. Only two sets of this group are currently known; the first group, in "sage-green" painted wood and "coral-red" leather, has been divided up amongst five museums and a private collector, while the chair being sold here descends from a privately held group in California. <p>The powerful chair design exhibits the American modernist penchant for both streamlining and skyscraper verticality, and is related to Bruno Paul's green and silver-lacquered dining furniture for R.H. Macy in New York in 1928, as well as to Weber's previous designs for Barker Brothers. The other pieces in the "The Kem Weber Group" are more ornamental, and incorporate walnut surfaces carved with a Mayan zig-zag frieze.
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