Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1902 Pécs, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary)

Died: 1981 New York, USA

Year of Migration to the UK: 1935

Other name/s: Marcel Lajos Breuer

Biography

Architect Marcel Breuer was born in 1902 to a Jewish family in Pécs, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary). He was educated at the Magyar Királyi Föreáliskola in Pécs before enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, with a scholarship to study painting. However, he swiftly left to begin an apprenticeship with a Viennese architect. He was then recruited by architect Walter Gropius to join the newly-founded Bauhaus School in Weimar, with its mission to marry functional design with the principles of fine art. Beginning in 1920 as a student, by 1925 he was director of the carpentry workshop, inventing the tubular steel chair ('B3'), inspired by the curved steel handlebars of his Adler bicycle, later nicknamed the ‘Wassily’ after Wassily Kandinsky who owned one of the first production models. At the Bauhaus Breuer was able to connect and work with important modern artists, including Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers. In 1926, he married fellow Bauhaus graduate Marta Erps. Breuer left the school in 1928 to open his own architectural firm; his first building design in 1932 was for a house in Wiesbaden. Relocating to Budapest, Breuer was unable to return to Germany after the National Socialists took power in 1933 and he moved to Switzerland to concentrate on furniture design, which was critically acclaimed but financially unsuccessful.

Concerned for his safety under the Nazi regime, Gropius advised Breuer to move to London in 1935. Here he continued to produce furniture designs, working with Jack Pritchard of the renowned Isokon Company, an early champion of modern design in the UK. Although Breuer wanted to develop the steel pieces he had worked on at the Bauhaus, Pritchard advised that the British public were too traditional to buy metal furniture, and suggested he work in plywood instead. As a result, Breuer produced a series of five pieces, including an armchair, chaise longue, and nest of tables, characterised by fluid and sinuous forms. Breuer also co-founded an architectural company with British architect F. R. S. York, with whom he designed the P. E. Gane Pavilion for a local progressive furniture company at the Royal Agricultural Show in Bristol in 1936. The building combined different local materials, with supporting walls in stone, glass walls for light, and light wooden partitions between rooms. In the architect's own words, the pavilion ‘shows how traditional materials can be employed in a modern spirit. Contemporary architecture on new lines can be carried out not only in concrete and steel, but also in stone and wood’ (Country Life, 27 June 1936 p. 690). In 1936 Breuer designed a modernist home in Angmering-on-Sea, Sussex, and participated in the exhibition Contemporary Furniture by 7 Architects at the Mansard Gallery at Heal’s furniture store in London, showing ‘extraordinary but none the less comfortable chairs in sycamore ply and upholstery, as well as some detachable wall fittings which could be used as cabinets and bureaux' (Country Life, 2 May 1936, p. 32). Breuer also contributed articles to Architectural Review; In ‘Where do We Stand?’ (April 1935), he discussed the aims of modern architecture, denying any need to be ‘original’, ‘individual’ or ‘imaginative’, drawing parallels between ‘modern’ and ‘vernacular’ ('peasant') architecture (The Times 1935, p. 8). In January 1938, The Jewish Chronicle (21 January 1938, p. 25) reviewed an exhibition of work by the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS) at the New Burlington Galleries in London, in which Breuer featured in a group of sixty modernists - among them, a number of notable émigrés.

In 1937 Gropius was asked to join the faculty of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and Breuer moved to the USA to join him. Many of their students would become some of the most significant architects and designers of the twentieth century, including I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, and Philip Johnson. Between 1938 and 1941, Breuer and Gropius collaborated on several architectural projects in north-eastern USA. After a creative break with Gropius, in 1946 Breuer moved to New York City to establish his own company where he received some of his most iconic commissions, including the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1953–58), IBM research centre in La Gaude (1960–62), and the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan (1966). In 1968 he won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects and his work was included in the exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, at Burlington House in London. In 1976 Breuer retired from architecture and was awarded the Grande Medaille d'Or by the French Academy of Architecture. He died in New York City in 1981. His papers and drawings were donated to Syracuse University Library in the late 1960s and the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian between 1985 and 1999. Posthumously, his work was celebrated in the UK with exhibitions including Beyond Bauhaus, Royal Institute of British Architects (2019); Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture (touring, 2004-2013); History of Modern Design in the Home, Design Museum, London (2003); and A Century of Chairs, Design Museum, London (2002). Examples of his designs can be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Design Museum, London, and National Museum Scotland, Edinburgh.

Related books

Barry Begdoll and Jonathan Massey, Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018)
Arnt Cobbers, Marcel Breuer, Form-Giver of the Twentieth Century (Köln: Taschen, 2017)
‘Wassily Lounge Chair’, The Times Luxx Magazine, 19 April 2008, p. 66
Peter Blake, Marcel Breuer: Architect and Designer (Museum of Modern Art, 2007)
Shirley Reiff Howard and Herbert Beckhard, Marcel Breuer: Concrete and the Cross (Hackley Art Museum, 1978)
J. M. Richards ‘Preview of the Bauhaus Exhibition’, 6 May 1968, p. 11
'Modern Architecture. A Provocative and Stimulating Exhibition', The Jewish Chronicle, 21 January 1938, p. 25
‘Correspondence. Architecture and Local Materials’, Country Life, Vol. 79, Fasc. 2058, 27 June 1936, p. 690
Geoffrey Boumphrey, ‘Built-in Furniture’, 16 May 1936, p. xxiv
‘New Wine’, Country Life, Vol. 79, Fasc. 2050, 2 May 1936, p. 32
‘Modern Furniture’, The Times, 27 April 1936, p. 21
The Times, 22 April 1935, p. 8
Marcel Breuer, 'Where do We Stand?', Architectural Review, April 1935, pp. 133-136
'Art Periodicals', The Times, 22 April 1935, p. 8
‘Aluminium for Furniture: Inventor's Experiments’, The Manchester Guardian, 11 July 1935, p. 6

Public collections

Related organisations

Bauhaus (student, teacher)
Harvard University (teacher)
Isokon Company (designer)

Selected exhibitions

Beyond Bauhaus, Royal Institute of British Architects (2019)
Design Museum Collection: Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things, Design Museum, London (2014)
Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture, Touring Exhibition, incl. Lighthouse, Glasgow (2004-2013)
History of Modern Design in the Home, Design Museum, London (2003)
A Century of Chairs, Design Museum, London (2002)
Bauhaus Dessau, Design Museum London (2000)
Marcel Marcel Breuer: Furniture and Interiors, Museum of Modern Art (1981)
Fiftieth Anniversary of the Bauhaus, Burlington House, London (1968)
Contemporary Furniture by 7 Architects: Christopher Nicholson, Christopher Heal, Raymond McGrath, Marcel Breuer, Brian O’Rorke, Maxwell Fry, Jack Howe, Mansard Gallery, Heal’s, London (1936)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Marcel Breuer]