Hello. Monday, lots of furniture ahead, let’s get to business.
Obs 151:
Breuer as Darwin’s finches
This Breuer B46 chair—a perfect specimen, designed in 1929 (when Breuer was 26, 27), big saggy ass, either leather or eisengarn (waxed cotton) probably produced by Thonet, maybe one produced for the Hotel Metropole in Brussels where this one took up—looks not unlike his other chairs but with small differences. An inversion of his B64? Far away from the B5 as on this original Snake newsletter promo card:
Similar chairs, key differences: eisengarn, leather, woven cane; tubular steel, armrests, not. It’s a litmus test: can you identify the Breuer chair number by sight? Not all of us always can. Was digging around and made this Lightning Mag style differentiating graphic:
Bunch of them. Not the 46, but that one’s in the auction. Key below the paywall. The dream… she’s always the same.
Roberta Flack’s furniture
Rare is the estate auction where the furniture pluses the name, but they come around once in a wild, and the best have a narrative element and provenance behind them along with material goods. So too here. Roberta Flack—rest in peace—the singer behind Killing Me Softly, The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face, passed a year last winter in Manhattan. Her music will live forever, now her shit is on sale. And man, she’s got some good stuff. Most prominent is the Studio 65 Boca sofa—the lips one, which is in the chick’s bathroom in Grand Central Oyster Bar—which I’ve never seen before in this color; which has sold once, last year, for €3,400 and before the pandemic for $1,200. Flack lived in the Dakota for a while; this photo of her place from 1975:
Is badass—Scarpa, Breuers (see above), Arco lamp, what looks like a Zanuso coffee table. God, buying furniture in 1975 must have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Walk into a store. “Give me the good shit. Yeah, I’ll take that Tobia Scarpa that came out over the weekend. And I’ll take this lamp that will outlive the American experiment. And let me have a can of Coke for a nickel.” But still. Respect. Gotta wonder when-ish she got the Boca.
There’s also the Diane Keaton estate auction, which ends in June and which friend of the newsletter (and furniture head) David McCabe notes has a lot of found photography she discovered for sale as prints. It’s been collected in a book in case it’s too rich for us working people.
