Sebastian Hackenschmidt 
The Thonet Chair: 
From Functional 
Furniture to 
Design Classic 
The “Holy Chair” 
“Perhaps you will still remember when I picked up a 
Standard Thonet chair, held it up, and urged those present 
not to let go of natural sources of form! For this worship of 
the Thonet chair I only succeeded in being branded by the 
Secessionists, without exception, as a non-artist.” 
- Adolf Loos 1 
On 11 May 1963, an exhibition which dealt with the images of mass 
media and pop culture and was meant to characterize the concept of 
“capitalist realism" was opened in Düsseldorf city center. 2 The artists 
Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter rented 
an empty butcher’s shop at Kaiserstraße 31A and installed texts, pictures, 
and objects there, many of which can now be identified only with the 
help of the photographs that were taken-mostly by Manfred Kuttner-at 
the opening of the exhibition. One of these black-and-white shots shows 
a view from inside the exhibit location through the shop window, in front 
of which Sigmar Polke can be seen looking at the exhibits. One of the 
works of art in the foreground is a simple Thonet chair, which was already 
over half a Century old at the time of the exhibition-this was model No. 
360, which was first presented in the 1912 Thonet catalog. 
What the black-and-white photograph of this “first exhibition of ‘German 
Pop-Art”' 3 does not reveal, though, is that the chair had been painted 
magenta with luminous florescent color: In this way Manfred Kuttner 
had spiced up the old piece of furniture and ironically declared it to be 
the “Holy Chair.” The artist had certainly taken the accusation of blas- 
phemy into account in arch-catholic Rhineland: “a banal object as a 
representation of the sancta sedes." 4 However, the canonization of the 
piece of furniture through artistic appropriation also makes reference to 
its “ubiquity”: Kuttner presented the Thonet chair not as a traditional 
antique, but-together with a bündle of magazines which Polke entitled 
“Massenmedien" [Mass media] and a washing powder package from 
Lueg-as a subject which was still very typical for the Contemporary res- 
idential landscape, and thus as a living part of the populär and everyday 
culture, on which the “capitalist realism” of the artists fed itself. 5 
It may be doubted that Kuttner deliberately made use of a Thonet model; 
in fact, it was probably simply about an “ordinary chair," 6 which was still 
widely used in the post-war period. After Marcel Duchamp’s readymades- 
1 Adolf Loos in a letter draft to Felix Salten (probably 1930), cited after: Burkhardt Rukschcio / 
Roland Schachei, Adolf Loos. Leben und Werk, Salzburg / Vienna 1982, 53. 
2 Exhib. Cat. Cologne 2013: Leben mit Pop. Eine Reproduktion des kapitalistischen Realismus. 
3 Cf. The press release for the exhibition at the Kaiserstrasse location (typescript, ca. May 1963), 
displayed in: Sediment 7: Ganz am Anfang / How it all began Richter, Polke, Lueg & Kuttner Leben 
mit Pop, Cologne 2004, 72. 
4 Christine Mehring, “Kapitalistisch-Realistische Informationskunst” in: Exhib. Cat. Cologne 2013/2: 
Manfred Kuttner, Werkschau, 16-32: 16. 
5 The fact that furniture was considered as a consumer object in the context of capitalist realism is 
also confirmed by the October 1963 exhibition „Leben mit Pop“ [Life with Pop] mentioned, which 
Konrad Lueg and Gerhard Richter organized in a furniture störe in Düsseldorf. 
6 Mehring 2013/2 (as in note 4). 
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