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2 MARCEL BREUER WASSILY CHAIRS EAMES ERA GAVINA
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2 MARCEL BREUER WASSILY CHAIRS EAMES ERA GAVINA
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2 GAVINA S.p.A WASSILY M. BREUER CHAIRS
THE GAVINAS ARE IN EXTAORDINARILY GOOD CONDITION LEATHER SHOWING AGE NOT WEAR THE GAVINA'S ARE FROM THOMAS CORNELL GALLERIES/AUCTION HOUSE ON LONG ISLAND. CORNELL GALLERIES DEALS PRIMARILY WITH ANTIQUES BUT I WAS ABLE TO FIND THESE ODD PIECES THAT THE HARDCORE ANTIQUERS WERENT INTERESTED IN. NO LABELS BUT I WAS ABLE FIND A LISTING THAT MATCHED THE EXACT DIMENSIONS AND AS IT GOES WE BELIEVE THEM TO BE GAVINA MANUFACTURED BETWEEN 1965-68 BEFORE KNOLL GOT THE RIGHTS T HE GAVINA CHAIRS LOOK LIKE THEY WERE NEVER USED ITEMS WILL SHIP VIA GREYHOUND BUS OR LOCAL PIC UP WELCOME REDUCED SHIPPING AS OF 05-11-07 The Italian entrepreneur Dino Gavina was one of the matchmakers in the marriage of cultural trends and manufacturing technology that bred the modern design industry. More specifically, it was Gavina who first put into mass production designs for furniture by members of the Bauhaus, so giving the wider public the chance to bring into their homes styles that had once been the preserve of a few. It was a democratisation of taste whose heirs have included Terence Conran and Ikea. Fifty years ago t was no notion of "designer" goods - items prized for the cachet of their creator's name yet widely available. Instead, most expensive objects - dresses or furniture - were handmade one-offs, while mass-produced goods tended to be utilitarian. Then in 1962 Gavina, who owned a small furniture business in Bologna, flew to New York to meet Marcel Breuer. In the 1920s Breuer had taught cabinetmaking at the Bauhaus, the influential German school of art and architecture, w he had attempted to fuse industrial processes with creative impulses. His experiments had been cut short when the Nazis closed the school in 1933, but Gavina wished to resuscitate his ideas. Initially a mere manufacturer of seats for railway carriages, he had come to art and design through a friendship with the painter Lucio Fontana and he now approached the business with the passion of a zealot. He and Breuer quickly hit it off, and Gavina returned to Italy with permission to manufacture multiple copies of Breuer's best-known design, the Wassily chair. The tubular-steel frame of the seat had been inspired by the handlebars of Breuer's racing cycle, and had been admired by the painter Wassily Kandinsky, a colleague at the Bauhaus. Forty years after its conception, Gavina was struck by how modern the design remained, and his instinct that others would share his liking for it were proved correct by the sales when he put it into production. The chair became a fixture of homes and offices around the world, and a small revolution had begun. Dino Gavina was born just outside Bologna in 1922. The son of a builder, he was an unruly child and had little formal education. He began work as a doorman at a theatre, and from t progressed to helping to make set designs. By 1948 he had a backstreet workshop that made, among other things, seats for army jeeps, as well as occasional items of contemporary furniture. One such was a desk that he made for Fontana, and it was through him that he met the designer Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. Theirs was to become one of the key partnerships in Italian industry. In 1960, with the architect Carlo Scarpa, they set up a furniture company, and in 1962 a lighting manufacturer, Flos. Modern furniture was then barely known in Italy, and the two businesses were to become cornerstones of what was soon the country's flourishing home-design sector. Gavina himself was not so much a designer as a cultural impresario. Happy to delegate, he perhaps saw his main role as that of support and inspiration. A modest, boyish, intensely curious perfectionist, he was also open to influence himself, and cultivated friendships with Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp - the latter's work filled the showroom which Gavina opened in Rome. In 1967 Gavina opened the Duchamp Centre in Bologna, a space given over ... 
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