Elite Diamant, Nickel-plated brass lamp, 1930’s

Elite Diamant, signed et numbered.

Marcel Breuer, in the style of.

Bauhaus style desk lamp in nickel plated brass with black granit rectangular base. Shaft composed of the tree tubes and an half-cylindracal shade.

Stamped twice “Elite Diamant” et “Diamant Art Studio” on the base and the shade and numbered twice 235.

Mark “New York 1938” on the shade.

Work in the style of Marcel Breuer lamps exhibited at l’Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs de Paris 1925.

Functional electrical system.

Dimensions : H 36 x W 14 x D 20 cm.

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) was an architect and a designer born in Hungary and considerate as one of the father of the Modern movement. He trained at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, between 1920 and 1923. He worked for an architecture agency in Paris and came back the following year at Bauhaus that moved to Dessau in the meantime. He was young master and chief of the carpentry workshop. During this period he created the famous B3 chair, or Wassily Chair, the first one using tubular steel structure !
He was the creator of furniture and interior decoration of the new Bauhaus buildings and masters’ houses. He was professor at the Bauhaus until 1928 when he left to Berlin and created here furniture manufactured and commercialized by his startup Standard-Möbel then bought Thonet; it was the beginning of a long and strong collaboration between the furniture editor and the designer.
Marcel Breuer received orders from the Deutscher Werkbund to realize furniture for the German division of the SAD exhibition in Paris in 1930.
In 1935 he escaped from the rising of Nazism and settled for a time in London, then he moved to the USA in 1937. Walter Gropius, his former Bauhaus fellow, helped him to get a job of professor at the architecture school of the Harvard University. They also created together an architecture agency in New-York in 1946 and built together many villas and houses.
The MoMA of New-York realized an exhibition of his works in 1947 and he was a part of the team in charge of the realization of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 1953. At this time, as many modern architects, he showed a deep interest in concrete. In 1956 he created his own company, Marcel Breuer and Associates, still in New-York.
Today, Marcel Breuer’s creations are unavoidable pieces of design, as his B3 armchair or the cantilever Cesca chair.