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On a visit to the British Museum in the 1930s, the American interior designer T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings found himself entranced by several fifth-century vessels from ancient Greece. “On these vases I saw furniture that was young, untouched by time,” he later reflected on the lifestyle imagery of the classical period. “Vitality surged through this furniture.”
He was contemplating the klismos, a sculptural chair with a curved backrest, woven seat, and tapered saber legs that swoop like apostrophes. In the images—now mostly found on funerary vessels, painted pottery, and bas-reliefs—sitters assume a relaxed posture, their hands often gliding to rest on the low back.
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“Not a single chair like that survives,” explains George Manginis, academic director of the Benaki Museum in Athens. “The earliest revivals we have are from the 18th and 19th century, when the klismos became fashionable with the discovery of ancient art.” But some of those neoclassical tributes, rendering the style with squat, rather bulky proportions, miss the grace of their predecessors. (One exception is the fleet of klismos at Villa Kérylos, the Côte d’Azur Greek Revival home of French archaeologist Théodore Reinach.)
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After Robsjohn-Gibbings’s epiphany, he endeavored to remake the chair with its essential, stripped-down precision, debuting a series of handmade replicas in 1936 at his Madison Avenue showroom. (One from that era is now owned by the Met.) By the ’60s, wanting to manufacture at greater scale, he met Eleftherios Saridis, an Athens-based cabinetmaker who had the machinery—and reverence for the originals—for the job. The refined, honey-colored walnut designs they made together (still in production) soon filled the homes of Greek socialites—that’s where photographer Slim Aarons first spotted the seat that inspired his famous Acropolis self-portrait. Ever since, the klismos has never left the conversation—showing up in homes of Karl Lagerfeld and Madonna. Jessica Sailer’s place (see page 186), by AD100 debut Remy Renzullo, features several renditions. Manginis, who is planning a show of klismos later this year, chalks up its enduring appeal to something more than just form or function. “It comes from the age of democracy, the age of great classical art,” he explains. “I mean, if Pericles sat on a chair, he would have sat on this chair.”
This story appears in the AD100 issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
