Deep-seated. The Secret Art of Upholstery at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig
...The Secret Art of Upholstery the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, invite you to do just that... For our part we were very taken by, and amongst a great many other works, a recreation of a late 1920s lounge suite by Ernst Max Jahn for Carl Müller & Co, Leipzig, featuring fabric by Josef Hillerbrand, which is not only a joy to behold, not least through the way the legs appear to mock the Baroque and the Rococo, but also its reminder of the vivid colour of the 1920s, something that all to often gets lost in thoughts of white walls and polished tubular chrome; by a 1930s round steel tube cantilever chair by Heinz and Bodo Rasch, a work which helps underscore the utter unfairness of the anonymity the Rasch brothers have fallen into, and how their idealistically non-quadratic steel tube designs allow for necessary reappraisals of inter-War steel tube furniture design; by an outrageously overblown, appalling so, 1930s work attributed to Otto Schulz for Boet Möbel, Gothenburg, a work which does everything wrong, yet strip it back and you are left with a joyously well conceived and formulated position, just over-thought and over-upholstered, and a work which challenges easy, lazy, dishonest, claims of an inherent Scandinavian reserve; by two inter-War bent tubular steel cantilevers by Anton Lorenz for DESTA Berlin, one of which features padded cushions placed on static (looking) steel bars, the other padded cushions on tension springs stretched across the frame; tension springs rather than coiled springs which remind very much of Willy Knoll's 1920s Antimott, Anti-Moth, system and thus help highlight Modernist reforms of upholstered furniture in context of the mantra of hygiene...
