The family name and legal battle behind Marcel Breuer’s iconic chair

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Though Breuer is sometimes credited with designing the first cantilevered chair, legal credit for the innovation belongs to Dutch architect, urban planner, and furniture designer Mart Stam. In November 1926, Stam sketched a chair made of gas pipes and elbow joints that he had made for his wife earlier that year. Its sharp, 90-degree angles and elbow joints seem incongruous with the sweeping curves of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1927 cantilevered side chair and the clean, continuous lines of Breuer’s work. Still, it had no back legs, motivating furniture designer and businessman Anton Lorenz to seek out Stam in 1929 to obtain the rights to use his model. 

At the time, Lorenz worked with Standard-Möbel, which had been founded by Kalman Lengyel and Breuer in late 1926 or early 1927 to sell Breuer’s existing designs. Breuer entered into an agreement with Thonet in July 1928 to transfer the rights to his tubular steel furniture, with production in Germany likely starting the following year, though prototypes of Breuer’s first cantilevered chair were stored at Standard-Möbel until June 1929. Shortly after Thonet purchased Standard-Möbel in April 1929, Lorenz refused to sign over the rights to produce the B33 and B34 (also labeled as L33 and L34, respectively). But Thonet considered the two models under its ownership and began production on them as early as July 1929, leading Lorenz to sue.

Breuer was not a defendant in the case, merely a witness. In a 1979 interview, when asked about the copyright of the cantilevered chair, he said of a conversation he had with Stam, “I shared everything I knew, I was very naive … He didn’t mention to me that he was working on tubular steel furniture. This was in the beginning of 1926 or maybe 1927. I explained that I was working with a craftsman in Dessau and I would like to introduce a heavier tubular section to do a heavier cantilever chair. He went home and drew it up this chair.”

Gropius, among others, testified on Thonet’s behalf that Stam’s chair was based on Breuer’s earlier work, but the County, Supreme, and Appeals Courts all ruled in Lorenz’ favor. As a result, Lorenz’ company, Desta, which he founded in September 1929, had sole rights to the cantilever chair in Germany. Thonet reattributed all side chairs Stam and all armchairs to Lorenz, including the B32 (Cesca), though it continued to pay royalties to Breuer for his designs. Only a month after winning the suit in 1932, however, Lorenz gave Thonet the rights to retail the chairs and closed down his production facilities, leaving Thonet to produce them. 

New era, new name

The drawn-out legal battle between Thonet and Lorenz, according to Breuer, exasperated him so much that he quit designing tubular steel furniture. After leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, he established himself as an architect in Berlin, taking on small commissions and supporting himself on the royalties of his furniture. 

With Gropius’ assistance, Breuer relocated to England in 1935 and to the United States in 1937, where he became a faculty member at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and earned a salary of $6,000 (about $135,000 today). He left Harvard in 1946 and opened a New York office on 438 East Eighty-Eighth Street. Over the following decade, he emerged as an internal figure of modern design and was dubbed one of the “form-givers of the 20th century” in a 1956 TIME article alongside Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright. 

All the while, cantilevered chairs grew in popularity. By the late ’50s, Breuer and many other architects used the B32 side chair in their spaces, along with its armed version, the B64, and in 1962, Italian designer Dino Gavina flew to New York to seek the reproduction rights for the chair along with Breuer’s other 1920s designs. Breaking with traditional furniture-naming conventions, Gavina renamed the chair the Cesca, after Francesca, whom Breuer and his second wife, Connie, adopted from Stuttgart, Germany, in the late ’50s. 

Gavina began selling the Cesca through his company, Gavina SpA, which he’d founded in 1960 to represent emerging Italian modernists. But in 1968, he was forced to sell the company, which Knoll International was eager to buy, as it secured them the rights to the Cesca, Wassily, and Laccio. To market its Breuer Collection, Knoll sent photographer Jon Naar to the Breuers’ New Canaan, Connecticut, home, where he captured Francesca seated back-to-front on the chair.

In a 2024 interview with US Modernist, Francesca remembers being about 12 years old and “very disgruntled” when Naar came by the house, though she now jokes about recreating the photograph. In a testament to its staying power, the Cesca would be just as fitting in a contemporary spread as it was in the ’60s, as it has only continued to cement its status as a classic piece of furniture design history.