Lot Essay
Lilly Reich was born in Berlin in 1885. She trained as an embroiderer, and from 1908 to 1911, worked with Josef Hoffmann at the Wiener Werkstätte. In 1911 she returned to Berlin where she met Hermann Muthesius; the following year she became a member of the Deutsche Werkbund, and was elected as the first female board member in 1920. From 1920 to 1924 she had her own studio for interior design and fashion in Berlin. In 1927 she moved to Stuttgart to work with Mies van der Rohe on his designs for furniture at the Wiessenhof project (see lot 71). She also collaborated in the design for the German pavilion at Barcelona in 1929 and in 1932 was appointed director of the Bauhaus weaving workshop by Mies.
Reich first met Mies in 1925, and they developed a close professional and personal relationship which ended only when Mies went to America in the mid 1930s after the closure of the Bauhaus. Reich remained in Germany apart from a brief visit to Mies in Chicago in 1939, and died in Berlin in 1947.
Reich's designs for tubular steel furniture are exceptionally rare. Although it is known that she collaborated with Mies on several occasions, the only evidence of her own specific designs is provided by the Bamberg Metallwerkstätten catalogue of 1931 (reproduced Vegesack, op. cit., p. 66/7). This features, on the same page as a group of Mies' designs, (denoted by the prefix MR), a chair with closely comparable back-angled lines to the present chair, listed with the prefix LR120. Ostergard, (op. cit., p. 156, fig. 5-59), reproduces a 1931 drawing for forerunner of the LR120 from the Mies archive, which precisely echoes the line of the present chair. It has been argued that this drawing, whilst in Mies' hand, is in fact Reich's own design. The supremely elegant line of the present chair, whilst close to many of Mies' designs of the same date, is without specific parallel in his work, and points directly to Reich as its author. Reich is also credited with a virtually identical design produced for Thonet in 1936, (after Mies' departure for America), but which never went into production.
See: Vegesack, p. 66/67.
Ostergard (ed.), p. 156.
Reich first met Mies in 1925, and they developed a close professional and personal relationship which ended only when Mies went to America in the mid 1930s after the closure of the Bauhaus. Reich remained in Germany apart from a brief visit to Mies in Chicago in 1939, and died in Berlin in 1947.
Reich's designs for tubular steel furniture are exceptionally rare. Although it is known that she collaborated with Mies on several occasions, the only evidence of her own specific designs is provided by the Bamberg Metallwerkstätten catalogue of 1931 (reproduced Vegesack, op. cit., p. 66/7). This features, on the same page as a group of Mies' designs, (denoted by the prefix MR), a chair with closely comparable back-angled lines to the present chair, listed with the prefix LR120. Ostergard, (op. cit., p. 156, fig. 5-59), reproduces a 1931 drawing for forerunner of the LR120 from the Mies archive, which precisely echoes the line of the present chair. It has been argued that this drawing, whilst in Mies' hand, is in fact Reich's own design. The supremely elegant line of the present chair, whilst close to many of Mies' designs of the same date, is without specific parallel in his work, and points directly to Reich as its author. Reich is also credited with a virtually identical design produced for Thonet in 1936, (after Mies' departure for America), but which never went into production.
See: Vegesack, p. 66/67.
Ostergard (ed.), p. 156.