ArtistDutch
Mart Stam
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Martinus Adrianus Stam was born on 5 August 1899 in Purmerend, a small town north of Amsterdam. His father worked as a municipal tax collector, and Stam's path into the design professions began practically: he trained in Amsterdam at the National Standard School for Education in Drawing from 1917 to 1919, then found work as a draftsman at an architectural firm in Rotterdam. The early 1920s took him to Berlin, where he worked in the offices of Max Taut and Hans Poelzig before moving to Switzerland to collaborate with Karl Moser in Zurich and Arnold Itten in Thun.
In 1924 Stam co-founded the journal ABC Beiträge zum Bauen in Basel with El Lissitzky, a constructivist publication that announced his orientation toward rationalist, technically-driven architecture. The same instinct that drove him to reduce architecture to its structural logic led to his most consequential design: around 1926, working with lengths of standard gas pipe connected by plumber's fittings, Stam developed the first cantilever chair in history. The principle - a continuous bent frame without rear legs that uses the elastic tension of the material to support the sitter - was entirely new, and it would define a generation of modernist furniture.
The chair came to wide attention through the Weissenhof Siedlung exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927, where Stam's prototype was shown. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had learned of Stam's work during planning for the exhibition and passed information to Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus. Both Mies and Breuer subsequently developed their own cantilever chairs - the MR10 and the B32 respectively - leading to a patent dispute in German courts. Stam won. His design was taken into production by Thonet, where it became the S33, later also produced as the S34 with armrests and the S39 bar stool variant. Stam taught as a guest lecturer in urban planning at the Bauhaus in Dessau during the winter semester of 1928/29, one of several connections between his career and the school's circle.
His architecture from the same period is significant: he contributed to Ernst May's Neue Frankfurt housing programme in the late 1920s, and his 1929 Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam - co-designed with Johannes Brinkman and Leendert van der Vlugt - became one of the canonical works of European functionalism, later awarded UNESCO World Heritage status.
In 1930, Stam joined Ernst May's brigade of European architects who traveled to the Soviet Union to plan new industrial cities - Magnitogorsk, Makeyevka, Orsk, and Balkhash among them. He worked there until the mid-1930s alongside colleagues including Hans Schmidt and his future wife, Bauhaus student Lotte Beese. Returning west, he was appointed director of the Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs in Amsterdam in 1939. After the war, he became director of the art academy in Berlin-Weissensee in 1950, though he was removed from the post in 1952 during the Stalinist cultural purge and returned to Amsterdam. He and Lotte Beese moved to Switzerland in 1966, and Stam died in Zurich on 21 February 1986.
At auction on the Nordic market, Stam's work appears almost exclusively as sets of his Thonet cantilever chairs - the S33, S34, S39 bar stool, and S43 armchair variants. Auctionist records 15 items across houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk's European branches and Auctionet. Documented sale prices include an S39 bar stool set at 2,982 SEK and a pair of S33 chairs at 1,500 SEK. These are utilitarian objects rather than decorative art, and prices reflect secondary market realities for functional modernist furniture - though sets of early or well-preserved examples regularly command multiples of those figures at specialist design sales internationally.