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Why is a Thonet chair so modern, and yet at the same time it evokes the atmosphere of an 18th century café in Vienna? If we think of waiting rooms, offices, cafes, restaurants or meeting places we have recently visited, it is likely that one of these spaces featured a vintage piece by Thonet, or its newer edition. From legendary pieces such as the "14" bentwood chair created in 1859, to the tubular steel "S32" and "S64", for the past two centuries Thonet style has been a timeless feature in the public and home décor. What's more, the vintage pieces of the German brand continue to be highly sought-after.
The Thonet style is above all an attitude. From its foundation in Germany (1819) to its moving to Vienna (1842), up to the establishment of important headquarters such as the Frankenberg branch in Germany, the brand was a pioneer of mass production. The "14" chair fully met the needs of the mass market because it combined technology (the revolutionary technique of steam-bentwood), and logistics (the chair was dismountable and easy to ship, becoming one of the best-selling pieces of furniture in the world). The intuition that the synthesis between craftsmanship and industry was the key to the design of “modern” furniture belonged to the founder of the brand, the German carpenter Michael Thonet (Boppard, 1796 - Vienna, 1871), who is recognized as the first great industrialist and furniture designer of furniture, the initiator of all modern research on the bentwood technique.
To understand the versatile style of Thonet furniture, it is fun to analyze films, period photographs and works of art, such as the typical scene of a Viennese café furnished with Thonet chairs in Rudolf Vokel's Interior painting of the Griensteidl Café (1890); or The last evening by James Jacques Tissot (late 19th century), a canvas portraying an elegant lady traveling on a boat, wrapped in Victorian clothes and comfortably lying on a Thonet rocking chair. In the postcards of the beginning of the 20th century, the brand’s chairs can be spotted in restaurants, ballrooms and halls of luxury hotels such as the Impérial in Nice, not to mention the Thonet advertising posters of the time, which invited you to read and relax on a rocking chair in your living room. This was the midst of the Liberty period, and the Viennese Secession architects, such as Josef Hoffman, Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner, became keen on introducing bentwood furniture into their projects as an emblem of innovation. They also relied on big Thonet’s competitors of the time, such as Jacob & Josef Kohn in Vienna.
There is another famous side of the Thonet style, the one of the '30s, a period in which the brand (managed by the descendants of Michael), became a producer of tubular steel furniture, which is recognized as the second major innovation of modern furniture after bentwood. Collaborations began with Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer , while the success of the bentwood seats continued: Le Corbusier used to include the "B9" chair in a great deal of his projects, such as the villa La Roche-Jeanneret and the Esprit Nouveau pavilion in 1925.
In the '50s, the Italian designers of the Neoliberty style started to reinterpret the expressive freedom and the sinuous shapes of Thonet’s benwood chairs and rocking chairs, while a large number of Thonet's original pieces was exhibited in a big retrospective exhibition at the MoMA in New York, curated by architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers in 1953. That same year, the headquarters of Frankenberg were restored, and the brand changed its name into Thonet GmbH. In Frankenberg, the production and reinterpretation of the most iconic Thonet models continue nowadays, along with new collaborations with prominent contemporary architects and designers.
Those who plan a Viennese trip during the Christmas holidays can immerse themselves in the MAK exhibition “Bentwood and Beyond. Thonet and modern furniture design" (18 December 2019 -13 April 2020). To commemorate Thonet's 200th anniversary, the museum displays contemporary seats mixed with Thonet bentwood chairs and rocking chairs, bringing out comparisons and parallels between styles, techniques and design methods belonging to different eras and worlds.
