Pioneers and prophets of modern design

While most people think "modern" means 1950 to the mid-1960s, the movement actually started two decades earlier.  Bauhaus visionaries like Marcel Breuer and Mies Van Der Rohe, as well as French designers Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and Charlotte Perriand were designing chairs in the 1920s that both predicted and influenced the departure from the stuffy conservatism of Victoriana.

In the 1930s Gilbert Rohde created tubular steel chairs for Herman Miller and Troy, and Alvar Aalto began to work with molded plywood. The 1938 sling chair designed by Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy became the classic Fifties "butterfly" design.  The rounded corners of Russel Wright's furniture for Conant Ball and his belief in mass-produced home decor changed the way furniture was made available to consumers.

The trio of chairs designed in 1940 by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen won the MoMA Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition and reshaped our attitudes about the form and function of furniture.

After World War II, these chairs formed the vanguard of the mid-century modern movement and have been refined and repeated, copied and counterfeited, and faithfully revered ever since.

Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer, 1925
alginretro.com

Barcelona chair by Mies Van Der Rohe, 1927
knoll.com

Basculant "pony" chair by LeCorbusier and Charlotte Perriand, 1928
sillabarcelona.com

Molded plywood chair by Alvar Aalto, 1934
metmuseum.com

Tubular steel chair for Troy by Gilbert Rohde, 1930s
1stDibs.com

Russel Wright for Conant Ball
icollector.com

Lounge chair by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, 1940
moma.org