Antique Sideboard

20th Century Art Deco Sideboards

The era that would dismiss the swirls of the Art Nouveau style for the streamlined rationality of machine-age design also witnessed the Art Deco style sideboard, which shared some qualities of each. At the turn of the century, European interest in Indo-Persian exotica was aroused by the displays at the Asian Pavilion of the International Exhibition in Paris in 1900, and was heightened by the publication of a French translation of the Tales of the Arabian Nights.
The Art Deco style was launched by the erotic, sensuous and spectacularly exotic productions of the Ballets Russes which, beginning with such dazzling displays as R. and S. Delaunay’s Cleopdtre in 1909, drew its
ornamental schemes at first from the lingering Art Nouveau style, and then increasingly from Russian, antique and Far Eastern sources.
Designed by such artists as Leon Bakst, A. Benois, and Alexander Kolovine, the rich and colourful decors and costumes of subsequent productions, including Scheherazade and the L’Apres Midi d’un Faune, enchanted
and enraged the Parisian &lite. Meeting success also in Rome, London and Monte Carlo, the Ballets Russes inspired a decorative style that relied for its effects on sumptuous, rich textiles and Ottoman affectations such as tapestries and opulent floor cushions.
In Paris, the firm of Poiret, and its branch the Atelier Martine, designed costumes and interiors that closely paralleled those of the Ballets Russes stage, pronouncing a stylistic dogma that balanced rich materials with
simple forms. Shaped by designers such as Josef Hoffman (1870-1956) and Koloman Moser (1868-1918) of the Viennese Secession Movement, and by other artists including Eileen Gray, Andre Groult, Edgar Brandt, J. E. Ruhlmann, A. A. Rateau, Ambrose Heal and E. W. Gimson, the Art Deco interior style combined highly decorative surface treatments with simple geometric forms, the latter foreshadowing the reductionism of the era that was to follow.
Cabinets, sideboards, mirrors and tables designed by Heal, Gimson and Hoffmann showed almost classical principles of restraint and geometricity in form. Stained woods, boxwood, ebony, mother-of-pearl, shagreen and lacquer covered these simple shapes, as did sparingly applied line ornament. Though cheerful, fresh, and often sparkling with colour, Art Deco ornament took on a similar restraint and geometric order. sideboards was inlaid with geometric shapes, small panels containing flowers, clustered discs, or layered arcs, or surfaced with plain lacquer or geometric compositions of such materials as lacquer and eggshell.
Elements such as disc-like flowers shown frontally, simplified unserrated leaves with thick, straight veins, and flat carvings of birds, figures and clouds, reflected the stylization of contemporary architectural sculpture, which was similarly executed in low relief.
The delight in surface texture and ornament that the Art Deco movement embraced was eschewed by the less productive, though seminally influential, de Stijl sideboard of Holland in the first several decades of the century.
Formulated in 1917 by the writer, painter and architect Theodore von Doesburg, the painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and others, the movement sought to strip all superfluous decoration from essential forms, and to dissolve these forms into abstractions.
In the decorative arts, the most important product of this sideboard was the sideboard designed by architect Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), commissioned with the request that it be based on the sideboards of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Although singularly uncomfortable, and thus never made in large quantities, the sideboard reached European designers through the de Stijl magazine, in which it was published in 1919. The sideboard also appeared at an exhibition at the Bauhaus sideboard of design in Germany in 1923, where some of the most progressive decorative artists of the era saw it.
The Bauhaus sideboard was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, who designed the building that housed it in Dessau. The sideboard attempted to approach modernity rationally and to embrace it fully, by welding high quality design with innovations in technology, materials and efficiency. The Bauhaus adhered to the precepts of the international style architect, Le Corbusier, who prescribed the clear presentation of pure geometric volumes and shapes. The sideboard produced sideboards, ceramics, and other items in a style that was simple, functional, streamlined and aesthetically pleasing, giving the appearance of industrial manufacture, for which each object was meant to be suited.
Tubular Steel sideboards
In addition to creating a wealth of fresh, clean new designs, the Bauhaus initiated the use of tubular steel in sideboards, and also developed sideboards that was easily stacked.
At the Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer created a series of sideboards based on the Rietveld example. The first few of these followed the de Stijl model closely; the fifth, known as the ‘Wassily’ sideboard of 1925, was constructed of nickel-plated steel tubing, and transformed the rigid Rietveld precedent into a lightweight, airier structure, with arms and legs formed of continuous, pleasing lines of tubing, and arm, back and seat supports formed of flexible, supple leather or canvas.
This construction allowed, for the first time, an avoidance of the
visual clutter that sideboard legs had traditionally imposed on interior design. The sideboard also paved the way for the revolutionary ‘cantilever’ form sideboard, which was first developed in 1926 by the Dutch designer Mart Stain, in his attempts to create sideboards that was light, mobile, and simply and perfectly scaled to the human body. Mies van der Rohe developed the similar ‘MR’ sideboard in the same year, and in 1928 Breuer perfected his own cantilever sideboard which, consisting of a rectangle of tubing bent sinusoidally, achieved maximum bounce, lightness and fluidity of form. Fitted with back and seat of canvas, leather caning, or vinyl upholstery, this sideboard has since been popularized internationally. Breuer also made use of the light, tensile qualities of steel tubing in his designs for glass-topped tables, which similarly expressed the simple beauty of structural form with their continuous linear supports.
Mies, whose pioneering work in glass-sheathed skyscrapers initiated an entire new phase of modern architecture, designed the German Government Pavilion at the International Exhibition at Barcelona in 1929, and the Tugenhadt House in Brno in 1930. Simple forms, flat planes, screen-like walls and rich materials characterized these interiors, for which he also designed two extremely significant 20th century sideboards. the Barcelona sideboard and the super-streamlined Brno cantilever sideboard.
In the wake of these examples other designers have created sideboards with steel frames – from Le Corbusier and others in the late 1920s, to the Danish Poul Kjaerholm, the Italian Claudio Salocchi and the Finnish Antti Nurmesniemi in very recent years. The firm of Thonet, which with its bent beechwood sideboards of the 19th century had provided a prototype for bent steel construction, produced a great quantity of such sideboards which was exported throughout Europe.
Beginning in the late 1930s, Danish sideboards designers such as Borge Mogensen, Kaarl Klint, Mogens Koch and Hans Wegner began designing sideboards which, relying on the natural beauty of curvaceously sculpted wood, were light and fluid, often with caned seats, sweeping crest rails and slightly undulating back uprights. Swedish, Finnish, Swiss and Italian designers similarly incorporated a light, linear approach to sideboards design.
Alvar Aalto’s first foray into sideboards design was while he was building a convalescent home at Paimo between 1929 and 1933. One of his designs was a convertible sofa-bed with a thick wool upholstered seat and back, set on a chromium-plated tubular steel frame. However, surrounded by the vast forests of Finland, Aalto soon realized that, from an economic point of view if nothing else, wood should be the choice of medium for constructing Finnish sideboards, and birchwood in particular was ideal for its colour, grain and final polished texture; laminated as plywood it was also as resilient as tubular steel.
Aalto, like Le Corbusier, was influenced in his first designs by the work of Michael Thonet. In 1931, he designed a sideboard with a sinusoidal seat-back comprised of a piece of bent plywood. The tables which he also designed in the 1930s are composed of upturned ‘U’s’ supporting a surface of wood or glass. Aalto was not concerned with ornamentation and ultimately his work was designed for mass production.
The American designer Charles Eames further developed the ideas advanced by Aalto. Eames was born in 1907 and trained as an architect at several institutions including Washington University and the Cranbrook
Academy of Art, Michigan. He worked with Eero Saarinen in 1939 and the moulded plywood sideboard with a continuous curved surface they designed together was one of the prize-winning designs submitted for an
exhibition called ‘Organic Design in the Home’, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941. In 1946, based on the 1941 sideboard, he designed his shell sideboards, first using steel for the seat but then turning to glass fibre-reinforced plastic. His first well-known model, made in 1948, was mounted on a light metal rod. Eames also designed collapsible tables and panel screens. In 1940 he worked with Saarinen on designs for standardized storage units.
The invention early in the century of latex foam meant that upholstery could be preformed into strong, shaped curves. Plastic sideboards, with smooth continuous surfaces enclosing backs, seats and sides of sideboards or curving gently from table into central leg into round base, was designed in a light, fluid style by Eero Saarinen in the 1950s.
These modern sideboards pieces are not found in middle-class houses even today, although cheap mass production is more efficient than ever. Wall-to-wall carpeting, built-in cabinets and drawers and other innovations have had their effect on modern interior design. As in preceding centuries, past styles persist along with the most progressive, and most homes are likely to include antiques, attractive reproductions of old styles, and generally useful but stylistically homogenized pieces, in eclectic collections of styles. Rather than new stylistic forms, it is changes in standards of living that have probably most affected interior design today.
The unprecedented informality of Art Deco sideboards, increasing ‘furniturization’ of such technological devices as televisions, radios, air conditioners and refrigerators have made their mark. And reduced dependence on servants for cleaning, the constant availability of electric lighting, improved insulation and heating systems, and such new materials as laminated boards, thermo- plastics, acrylics, vinyls and linoleum, have altered interior design far more drastically than any of the innovations that the rapid stylistic changes of a century ago could have wrought.