Thonet 14 Title: Thonet 14 Authors: Giovanni Renzi Editor: Silvana Editoriale Pages: 104 Dimensions: 24x30 Photos and illustrations: Colors and B&W The history, development and copies of the bestselling chair in the world Over a hundred and forty years ago, in 1859, a Thonet factory in Koritschan in Moravia, produced the first chair known as number 14 in the catalogues of the Viennese company. Since then several million chairs of this model have been manufactured and sold. According to various scholars of the Thonet phenomenon (1), it is possible to speak of fifty million examples manufactured and sold by 1930, whilst according to the advertising of Gebruder Thonet in its contemporary catalogues, fifty million chairs had been sold before 1914. This success was followed by extremely widespread competition from local, national and international firms, with several million (2) copies of the original built using the same bent beech-wood technique. Finally, the same model was reproduced using other materials; firstly iron, which was initially handcrafted and later worked using modern welding techniques, and then plastic. Such figures have never been repeated in the furniture sector, and although they have probably been inflated by advertising propaganda, they still represent the worldwide success of an extremely simple model: an archetype of the chair. Ever since the last quarter of the nineteenth century news papers and magazines and travel magazines have portrayed people of all races and ranks sitting on the number 14, firstly in drawings and later in photographs. The success of number 14 is the success of Michael Thonet and the final result of the stubborn conviction that beech-wood and the bending technique represented the future of chair making. Following twenty years of experimentation, marketing mistakes, technological intricacies and partial failures, Thonet managed to create the economic chair for mass consumption. However, his original idea was not to create a “mass-consumption chair”. At least up until the time of the Great Exhibition of London in 1851, Michael Thonet’s working techniques were the same as those of a Biedermaier cabinetmaker, such as J.U. Danhauser, or an Empire period one, such as Antonio Basoli. It was the technological language that he used that set him apart from all the others and led him to pursue the “mass-consumption chair” following the partial failure experienced in terms of sales and critical response at the Great Exhibition of London held in the iron and glass Crystal Palace designed by Joseph Paxton. Despite its simplicity, the number 14 chair did not disregard the long experience of Michael Thonet and his sons, from both an artistic and a technological point of view; on the contrary, it represents a full summary of it. It embodies the Biedermaier experience of Thonet the cabinetmaker and the various and continuous improvements in the technique used for bending beech-wood, made in the years around 1850 applied to models 1, 2, 3 and 4. Finally, it embodies the influence of the typical iron architecture of the mid-nineteenth century, like Paxton’s Crystal Palace, under whose roof Thonet participated in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The number 14 is not the result of a flash of creative genius, but the end result of a technological quest that lasted almost twenty years; it is precisely its simplicity and adaptability to all places and users that makes it unanimously considered as the first example of industrial design. Minimalist in terms of the use of material and number of constituent pieces, it preceded Mies van der Rohe’s maxim “less is more” by 50 years. For at least thirty years its cost remained unaltered, making itself unapproachable by all other possible products (3). A real commercial war arose about the number 14 and its cost to the public when, in the period following 1869 – the year in which Michael and his five sons renounced the patent (4) – various companies offering the public the same products as those contained in the Thonet catalogues were established in every country. Nonetheless, it is not completely correct to talk of copies of the number 14 as during the first 40 years of production Thonet itself modified the dimensions and proportions of its basic product. Furthermore, following the Second World War, several factories of the original Gebruder Thonet Wien found themselves in Eastern Europe, but continued manufacturing the number 14 under another name. In Italy, for example, from the Fifties onwards, firstly Herbatschek and subsequently Italcomma marketed the number 14 chair manufactured in ex-Thonet factories situated in Eastern Europe. Consequently, although it is not really right to speak of copies, it is interesting to understand what the various competitors offered in a market with frozen prices and what were the technical and formal differences in respect to the mass consumption product manufactured by Thonet. An analysis of the evolution of the construction of the Thonet number 14 chair may also be useful for the precise dating of the other models manufactured by the Viennese company and its competitors. The technical and formal differences of the competitors, although often minimal, must not let us forget that cost of production is only one of the decisive factors in a commercial war over products of mass consumption. In this case there are a great many differences between Thonet, with its highly centralized and family-style management, and its competitors at both international (Kohn, Fischel, Mundus) and national level (in Italy, Antonio Volpe, Wackerlin, Sardella). These differences become even more relevant when we consider small local concerns such as, for example in Italy, La Prima Fabbrica di Mobili in Faggio Curvato or Marussich, which mainly competed on the market for the number 14 alone, leaving the larger companies to dispute the more complicated models. At the end of the Second World War none of the Thonet companies that survived the conflict featured the number 14 chair in their catalogues. It manage to survive the dark moments and the business ups and downs of the Thonet trade name thanks to the small competing companies that continued to produce it uninterruptedly. Following the splitting of the Thonet trade name into several national companies, the number 14 was reproposed in the German catalogues as the modern evolution of the number 14 (model 214) and in Vienna with the classic model produced around 1870. Note for the reader: It is necessary to formulate two premises are of primary importance to the reader/novice who approaches the world of Thonet for the first time without being acquainted with the enormous bibliography regarding the subject: 1) There are 2 periods in Thonet’s production history for which sales catalogues are not available, as they have never been found or made public by the numerous collectors. - The first period concerns the early production up until 1884. We do not know of any sales catalogues dated earlier than this. There are six advertising posters (1859,1866,1867, 1870 and two in 1873) that may be useful, but they are not exhaustive as they may not depict the complete product range (5). Indeed, it is unthinkable that a company such as Gebruder Thonet, which took care from the outset to distinguish itself with a trademark and exclusive patents, would have participated in several international exhibitions (London 1851 and 1861, Paris 1855 and 1867, Philadelphia 1876, Vienna 1870 and others) without an adequate sales catalogue. - The second period regards the years between 1895 and 1904. It is equally unthinkable that Thonet would not have produced any catalogue on occasion of the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900 and that it would not have produced a catalogue to mark the advent of the new century. It is possible that, following the discovery of new documents or catalogues from these two periods, some of the theories expressed in this book may need completing or at least partially reconsidering (6). 2) The numbering of the models followed in this book is that featured in the four advertising posters (1859,1866,1867, 1870 and 1873). This matter should be emphasized, as there are chairs that over the years have assumed numbers previously used to describe different models (7). Pictures and photographs exist of chairs(8) and furniture definitely produced by Thonet but never found in any of the Viennese company’s catalogues. These may have been special models built for certain events or alternatively models whose production was suspended due to problems regarding construction/technological aspects, costs or approval of the public. NOTES (1) In three separate books Karl Mang, Alexander Von Vegesac and Andre Gleiniger estimate Thonet’s production of number 14 chairs up until 1930 as 50 million examples. In the book Form and Process – The Thonet Chair, published on occasion of the bent beech-wood furniture exhibition at Harvard University in 1967, production up until 1920 is estimated as 30 million. This information, quoted from a book by Hermann Heller, makes this figure more credible than that quoted in the Thonet catalogues. Indeed, in 1905 in the preface to its general catalogue, Thonet claimed to have manufactured 45 million number 14 chairs by December 1903. The 1911 catalogue mentioned an estimated production figure of 50 million by 31 December 1910. Consequently this signifies a production of 5 million chairs in 7 years. But the annual production in 1905 was 142,143 number 14 chairs, a very far cry from the figure quoted. Furthermore, an internal document of the Viennese fabric currently conserved in Bistricz, mentions a figure of 9,950,000 number 14 chairs up until 1905. A hypothesis that can thus be put forward is that the figures quoted by the Thonet catalogues comprise the number 14 chairs produced by all the companies operating in the beech-wood furniture sector. (2) In Bentwood and Metal Furniture 1850-1946 the total production of number 14 chairs up until 1896 by all the companies manufacturing bent beech-wood furniture is estimated as 40 million examples. (3) In 1860 the chair was sold in Austria for three florins, with which sum it was possible to purchase 3-dozen eggs or ¾ litre of “house wine”. A worker in the Thonet factory would have been paid from 2 to 12 florins a week, according to his specialization. (4) Literally “privilege”, a type of patent granted to M. Thonet in 1852,1856 and 1859. The history of the various privileges obtained by M. Thonet for wood bending is better described in “Curve e Biondi Riccioli Viennesi”, Silvana Editore, 2000. (5) The 1866 poster shows a ladies’ dressing table that is not featured in the 1873 catalogue. The 1866 poster also fails to depict the number 14 armchair (but the number 8 armchair is featured) and the number 14 sofa. Both catalogues show the number 4 console but not the number 1, 2 or 3, whose matching tables already existed. The 1872 poster for the American market shows the number 1 chaise longue that does not appear on the following year’s poster. The number 22 armchair featured in the 1873 catalogue certainly already existed in 1859 – the year of the first poster – as the design of the backrest was used for the “Palffy armchair”. The armchairs and chairs produced for the Palffy Palace were made from a combination of laminated and solid beech-wood and can thus be dated to around the end of the 1850’s. (6) This is the case of several books published during the Seventies and Eighties, in which a chair manufactured by Neyger was attributed to Thonet. The construction of the seat in this number 14 led it to be mistakenly classified as the first step in the evolution of the Thonet number 14 chair. Successively, the discovery of documentation on Neyger enabled the error to be identified. (7) The number 9 chair of the 1911 Thonet catalogue is the reconstruction of Jacob and Josef Kohn’s number 30 model (photo: Kohn catalogue and number 30 chair) and not the number 9 chair of the previous Thonet catalogues presented in London in 1851. The Kohn number 30 chair and the Thonet number 9 of 1911 cannot be included in theories on the evolution of the number 14 as quoted in several Italian texts. (8) In the photograph showing the display space occupied by Thonet at the Munich Exhibition of 1854 a group of chairs can be seen that never appeared in the Thonet catalogues known today.