Vico Magistretti (Italian 1920-2006)
Set of Five 'Carimate' Chairs
£1,134
Auction: 27 October 2023 from 11:00 BST
Description
beech and rush seats
Dimensions
75cm (29 1/2in) high, 52cm (20 1/2in) wide, 58cm (27 7/8in) deep
Provenance
Provenance:
Acquired by Leslie Martin and Sadie Speight in the late 1970s and thence by descent to the current owner.
Footnote
The architect Leslie Martin (1908-2000) and his wife, the designer Sadie Speight (1906-92) played leading roles in twentieth-century architecture and design and as champions of progressive art. They met at the University of Manchester’s School of Architecture in the 1920s and married in 1935.
Martin is renowned as much for his ground-breaking architectural practice as for his research and contribution to education. He held many important public and academic positions, including Principal Assistant Architect for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (1939-48), Architect to the London County Council (1953-56) and Professor of Architecture at Cambridge University (1956-72). He was the architect of some remarkable post-war buildings, including the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank (1951), the Gulbenkian Foundation Centre for Modern Art in Lisbon (1979) and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow (1988).
Speight was also a qualified architect and had a celebrated career as a designer. She was a founder member of the Design Research Unit of the Council of Industrial Design in 1943, established to make designer skills available to industry. Her designs for products such as kettles, electric irons, textiles and rugs are particularly revered. After her death, Martin paid testament to Speight’s skill at converting properties in which they could live and work, creating a ‘background for living’ by the selection and placement of furniture, carpets, fabrics, upholstery, ceramics, books and works of art in homes and studios which were widely admired.
One of Martin and Speight’s collaborative projects, and their most obvious promotion of contemporary art, was their involvement with the seminal 1937 publication Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. Martin was a co-editor with Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, whilst Speight acted as Secretary and Barbara Hepworth was responsible for its layout. Circle highlighted the vital British contribution to the European abstract movement and was re-printed in 1971.
In 1938, Herbert Read commissioned Martin and Speight as joint authors of The Flat Book, which was published the following year. Conceived as a practical guide to contemporary furniture, fabrics and household projects, it is now considered a reference book about the 1930s Modernist aesthetic and is admired as an essential treatise on how the best of European design could be introduced into the British home. The foreword described its aim to be a ‘catalogue of well-designed furniture and equipment’ whilst attempting to ‘set out certain standards of contemporary design and…furnish at least a basis of criticism…to help the reader in selecting his flat…[and]…the problems of planning and furnishing’.
Amongst the items featured in the ‘Living and Sleeping Space’ section was a ‘Nest of tables, by Marcel Breuer, birch, £3 13s 6d (Isokon Furniture Co)’ (p.116) and a ‘Plan’ chair by Serge Chermayeff, described as an ‘Easy chair, 5 gns (Plan Ltd)’ (p.134), manufactured by the cutting-edge design companies Isokon Furniture Company and Plan Ltd respectively. These items alone could be said to encapsulate Modernist living in their innovative use of laminated plywood and sleek, simplified silhouettes. Martin and Speight acquired a set of the Breuer tables (lot 122) and a pair of the Chermayeff chairs (see lot 125) in the late 1930s. They became key features of their homes thereafter, seen for example in the sitting-room and nursery respectively in a 1953 article in House and Garden about their former gardener’s cottage in Tring Park, Hertfordshire.
Indeed, Martin and Speight enjoyed a longstanding friendship with Chermayeff and his wife Barbara, who on emigrating from England to the USA via Montreal in 1940, wrote to the couple: ‘We have met with great kindness and hospitality…we leave for the States on April 3 staying with Gropius…[Montreal]… is an astonishing place…the houses are incomplete and unindividual – the ‘Flat Book’ should be read.’ (Letter from Serge and Barbara Chermayeff of 28 March 1940 to Lesie Martin and Sadie Speight, Professor Sir Leslie Martin Personal Archive, National Galleries of Scotland GMA A70/4/1)
In about 1960, ‘Le Corbusier’ dining chairs by Thonet were acquired for use in Martin’s studio in The Mill, the central building in a complex converted by the couple in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire (four offered here as lot 123). Photographs of them in situ are reproduced in Martin’s 1983 publication Buildings and Ideas 1933-83 From the Studio of Leslie Martin and his Associates. In the late 1970s, Martin and Speight purchased a number of ‘Carmite’ chairs by Vico Magistretti, which formed part of the ‘background for living’ at The Barns nearby, to where they moved in 1977 (five offered here as lot 124). Originally built as the village granary in 1642, it was converted and extended for domestic and professional use.
Martin and Speight chose their furniture with great care, and once acquired, it was treasured. Indeed, in 1992 Michael Parkin wrote: ‘Most of the contents of the Martins' home dated from this period, from the early Thirties, with chairs by Serge Chermayeff and Marcel Breuer, tables by Alvar Aalto, lights by Jorn Utzon and even a coffee service by Ben Nicholson.’ (Michael Parkin, Obituary of Sadie Speight, The Independent, 27 October 1992). The couple were arbiters of the very best in twentieth-century design and civilised living, in which the tables and chairs presented here played a long-term role.