In 1830, a bearded German carpenter named Michael Thonet invented a way to bend wood as if it were clay: Soak it in boiling glue, then force it into curves. His bentwood furniture still sells today, and his company went on to father some of the world`s most famous chairs.
Among them: Thonet`s own Cafe Daum chair, still selling after 138 years. Le Corbusier`s slender black chaise–still sold. Marcel Breuer`s tubular steel chairs. The Caberet Fledermaus chairs by Josef Hoffmann, the Viennese architect. And Ludwig Mies van der Rohe`s cantilevered Brno chair.
Early this year a Chicagoan, Manfred Steinfeld, bought Thonet Industries Inc. for $8 million. By June he had brought back a dozen of its old classics and immersed himself in its archives. Now, he hopes to loan his Thonet antiques–about 75 pieces–for a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Steinfeld`s purchase of Thonet (an Austrian name that rhymes with sonnet, but often mistakenly pronounced thone-AY) comes seven years after its 150th anniversary, an event that sparked a round of museum shows and books.
”Thonet`s great contribution was its ability to create well-designed objects for a mass market,” says Lynn Springer Roberts, curator of the Art Institute`s department of European decorative arts and sculpture.
”Chicago has been involved in the furniture industry for a long time, so to see Thonet happily ensconced in Chicago would be a lovely thing.”
Steinfeld himself lives in a Lake Shore Drive condominium so modern that his bentwood antiques would be wildly out of place. He grew up in Josbach, a town near Frankfurt, Germany, but when the war began to percolate his mother sent him–alone, at 14–to an aunt`s home in Hyde Park. His mother and sister were swallowed up by the Holocaust. Steinfeld has been a Chicagoan ever since. Thonet now is a division of Shelby-Williams Industries Inc., the big chair-manufacturing company that Steinfeld has owned for 33 years. This firm, too, had small beginnings: It was the bankrupt Northern Chair Co. on Ogden Avenue when Steinfeld bought it with a former partner, Sam Horowitz.
”We just picked the name Shelby-Williams, no relation to anyone living or deceased. Horowitz-Steinfeld,” he says wryly, ”wouldn`t sound so good.” Today his chairs sit in top restaurants, colleges, hospitals and hotels
–including Hyatts, Marriotts and Hiltons.
With more hard work than flair, Steinfeld won the esteemed Horatio Alger award in 1981 for his up-by-the-bootstraps success. In his Merchandise Mart offices hangs a plaque from the White House, thanking him for providing the chairs for Jimmy Carter`s 1977 inauguration. (The seat-bottom of Amy Carter`s chair, Steinfeld reveals, was adorned with a wad of gum.)
Now, in a portrait in Steinfeld`s office suite, old Michael Thonet stares directly over a painted white beard. He was 20 years old when he set up his little furniture-making shop in Boppard, Germany; but he would labor for 25 years, according to numerous books on the company, before fortune struck.
It happened at an exhibition, where his bentwood furniture caught the eye of the most influential man possible–Prince Klemens von Metternich, chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and prime minister to the Emperor Franz Josef. Struck by the graceful and lightweight designs, Metternich invited Thonet to his castle, looked over more of his wares, and gave him a bit of advice.
”If you stay in Boppard,” Metternich warned, ”you will remain a poor man. Go to Vienna! I shall recommend you to the court there.”
The next year, Thonet got his audience with the prince. He wrote back to his family: ”I received a lovely large room for unpacking and repairing our furniture, which the Prince ordered delivered to his chambers immediately thereafter. . . . He rocked back and forth on the chair, held the cane I had given him . . . and praised the strength, which was combined with remarkable thinness.”
Impressed, the prince granted Thonet`s keenest desire–a patent for bentwood–and a commission to furnish the Liechtenstein palace.
And seven years later Thonet discovered, instead of boiling glue–steam.
Living in Vienna in the late 1800s, Michael Thonet and his five sons built up the world`s then-largest furniture company, according to the Thonet expert and author Christopher Wilk. At its peak, Wilk writes in Art & Antiques magazine, ”Thonet had more than 30 international branches and employed more than 6,000 workers, who produced almost 2 million pieces of furniture per year.”
Thonet was sold after World War I, and was ruled briefly and powerfully by a German businessman named Leopold Pilzer.
Where Thonet saw bentwood, Pilzer saw bent metal. Under his vision, Thonet began buying metal factories and working with the first and most famous designers of tubular steel furniture–Mart Stam, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe.
But Pilzer was forced out of business after only 16 years. Like thousands of German Jews he was ruined by the Nuremberg Laws, a set of Nazi edicts that yanked citizenship away from German Jews, and forbade them to own many businesses.
And so Pilzer, with little time or power to bargain, sold the Thonet factories in Germany and Austria back to their founding family, which turned them into two separate companies–both called Thonet.
But some things Pilzer kept.
He kept the Thonet factory in France, which split off from the Thonet empire. That made three Thonets.
He kept the right to the name Thonet–the international trademark
–although the German and Austrian companies can use it, too, in a number of European countries.
And, emigrating to the United States in 1938, he founded Thonet Industries Inc., which made four Thonets. It is the biggest in terms of sales, followed by Germany, Austria and France.
This fourth Thonet is what Steinfeld bought. Having brought back a dozen of its key designs, he now is going to the mat, ever so politely, with the European Thonets to protect his own rights to the name on certain turfs. Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Japan, England, Switzerland, Italy and Austria are all in his trademark territory, and so far it has cost him $11,000 in legal bills to keep his rights in those territories open. He has one licensee, producing Thonet designs in Canada.
Meanwhile, the same classic designs–their patents long expired–are being made by the European Thonets and by four big plants, formerly Thonet in name, but nationalized years ago by Iron Curtain countries; and also by a host of other companies.
The result is a tangle of identities that may never be resolved. ”You go to Wendy`s,” says Steinfeld, resigned, ”and you sit in a bentwood chair. It may be made in Poland, it may be made here. . . .”
