Eileen Gray's Bibendum Chair (1926)
A fabulously overweight fat boy that envelops the sitter in its corpulence.
“How our enthusiasm palls for the odd cabinets and chairs we have become familiar with in the homes and studios of our friends!” lamented an article in the September 1920 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “Never again can we be content without the proper setting from walls to doorways.” The occasion of this spasm of envy on the American magazine’s part was an afternoon its correspondent had spent studying the highly lacquered furnishings in the apartment of one Madame Levy, a wealthy hat maker. The lacquering was the handiwork of Eileen Gray, the Irish designer Levy had engaged to refurbish her Parisian pad. As part of her commission, Gray had created a number of conversation pieces, including a strange chair with a pair of arresting-looking dragons for armrests and a day bed in the form of an artisanal fishing vessel. But what really got tongues wagging were the glossy panels Gray had used to prettify the building’s unappealing walls and hide their ugly mouldings. Indeed, such was the stir caused by the novelty of her design, especially that of the brickwork pattern screen she erected in the hallway that led to Levy’s boudoir, that when the editor of the modish American monthly got wind of it, he felt the need to send someone over to Europe to find out what all the fuss was about.
The American magazine might have thought Madame Levy’s abode the height of fashion, but it was under no illusion it was the last word on the matter. The same article that lauded Gray’s finely wrought lacquerwork went on to suggest that it wouldn’t be long before something more faddish came along to take its place in fashionable society’s affections. This was because, the magazine cautioned its readers, fashionable females are inconstant creatures: “Women who crave the unusual in their setting have strayed after many new gods, for women are as restless a sex when it comes to outfitting their homes as children are in the search of pleasure.” True to form, Madame Levy soon grew discontented with her decor. Her curios had evidently lost some of their power to inspire curiosity and so she required something new to pique the interest of her guests. She naturally turned to Gray to provide it. By this point, however, the Irishwoman had moved on from resin and wood. If Madame Levy was to have a new idol to worship, it would be fashioned from metal.
At the time, creative types were starting to appreciate the potential that tubular steel held for furniture design. A number of Gray’s contemporaries – notably, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer – were feverishly experimenting with the stuff so that they might arrive at a tensile tube that could bear up under substantial loads. Breuer had led the way with the Wassily chair, his simplified take on the traditional club seat; but it was Van der Rohe, so obsessed by cylindrical steel that he spent the best part of the twenties experimenting with the stuff, who really found a way to get the most out of the metal. His mastery of the medium eventually allowed him to create the gravity-defying MR armchair, a confounding piece of cantilevered furniture, the slender steel frame of which really oughtn’t to be able to support a sitter. Both the Breuer and Van der Rohe’s chairs are stunning pieces of furniture, and yet perhaps their spartan aesthetic appeals more to the mind than the body. As Gray saw it, this was because modernism tended to drain the life out of objects, especially when applied too formulaically. She told an architect friend: “Simplicity does not follow from simplification, particularly such crude simplification. Formulas are nothing; life is everything. And life is simultaneously mind and heart.”
Gray’s answer to what she saw as this overcooked cerebralism was the Bibendum chair, a generously stuffed specimen that puts sensuousness front and centre. She was only too aware that the aesthetic of her well-girthed chair went against the grain and playfully acknowledged the fact by borrowing its name from Bibendum, the tire-clad fat fella who serves as the Michelin company’s mascot. The piece is inflected with other self-referential elements that are meant to advertise the fact the designer is playing with our expectations and ironising modernism’s reductionist tendencies. For example, at first blush, the Bibendum might seem overstuffed and top-heavy, a structure whose precariousness makes the sitter fear for its spindly tubular legs. The thick wedge of foam that provides the seat and the two oversized cylindrical cushions that provide the backrest and arms add to the impression that the chair is a bit of a bloater. However, far from imminent collapse, the legs are super strong and reliable. On closer inspection, we see that Gray has cleverly juxtaposed the elephantine cushions of the chair’s arms and backrest with the dainty base steel arrangement that undergirds the structure.
We can be sure that Madame Levy was pleased with her new conversation piece. In 1933, she allowed her flat to be photographed by L’illustration magazine, shortly after it had been (yet again) spruced up, this time by the architect Paul Ruaud. In the photos, the Bibendum chair can be seen to occupy pride of place in her main living space. In fact, she seems to have been so taken with her new seat that she purchased a pair of them and had them stand sentry in her salon on either side of the chair with dragons for armrests. How long they remained there, we can only speculate. Perhaps Harper’s Bazaar had her measure and she soon moved on to the next new thing. Interestingly, in 2011, the only extant copy of the chair from the very first batch of Bibendums Gray produced came up for auction at Christie’s. Upholstered in white skai, the same leather-like material that covered the pair of Bibendums in Levy’s flat, the chair fetched a price of over €700,000. Its provenance is uncertain, but for a piece of furniture almost 100 years old, it was in remarkably good nick. Its owner had evidently taken good care of it. If it was one of the two that had previously belonged to Levy, we can say her endless pursuit of novelty was over. Maybe she had finally found a place not just to sit but to relax.
The London-based company Aram today owns the worldwide head license for the Bibendum chair. Aram has licensed the German firm ClassIcon to distribute the chair in Europe, where it typically retails at €4,360. In the UK, it’s priced at approximately £2,600.
An Aram Bibendum chair measures: W92xD79xH73cm.