1940s Warren MacArthur Art Deco/Modernist Folding Chairs with Removable Desktops • Pair

These innovative and superbly designed 1940s Warren McArthur folding chairs are brimming with style and comfort. They would be perfect in a home office, home theater (with a great place to put your soda and popcorn!) or just simply for extra seating. The tactile and thick green vinyl cushions have springs and make for the most comfortable folding chair that I’ve ever occupied. In addition, the removable desktop comes in handy for multitudinous purposes. The Modernist tubular aluminum construction, hardware and upholstery are all American-made and solid.

About Warren McArthur

Warren McArthur was an American industrial design genius who lived from 1885 to 1961. Mostly unappreciated and unheralded until recent years, McArthur is now considered one of America’s most original designers. The son of wealthy parents, McArthur grew up in Chicago when it was a hotbed of innovation and progress. When he was 8, his father commissioned a house from Frank Lloyd Wright. McArthur earned an engineering degree from Cornell in 1908. In 1914 he joined his brother Charles in the then tiny city of Phoenix. His father gave each son a stake of $100,000 to get started in business. They prospered, opening successful car and truck dealerships from Arizona to Mexico. They founded Phoenix’s first radio station, the Arizona Club and the Arizona Museum.

In 1923 the father asked the brothers to build him a vacation house in Phoenix, with the help of a third son, Albert Chase McArthur, an architect who had trained as a draftsman with Wright. The sons built the house, but nearly ran out of cash for the project. To save money, Warren offered to design the furniture himself and have it made locally. He created the furniture out of tubular metal; this was in 1924, a year before Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe designed any tubular steel seating. Breuer’s revolutionary Wassily chair, named for its inspiration, the handlebars on the painter Wassily Kandinsky’s bike, was designed in 1925. No pre-World War II American modern designers were on par with the Europeans, except for McArthur. To give his aluminum furniture cultural panache, McArthur consciously compared it to silver and had it polished to look like muted silver. It never had the harshness of chrome. Warren moved to Los Angeles and set up a furniture fabrication company. Suddenly, aluminum was fashionable. The architect Paul Williams commissioned him to design 30 pieces of aluminum furniture for the Hollywood pool of members of the Cord family, the Indiana car tycoons. Jack Warner put McArthur tubular furniture in his house, as did Marlene Dietrich, Fredric March and Clark Gable, Mr. Brown said. McArthur furniture was made for the architect Rudolf Schindler’s design of Sardi’s restaurant in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, the company went bankrupt in 1933, and McArthur moved to New York, where he set up a sales office at 1 Park Avenue. When World War II broke out, aluminum was classified as a strategic commodity and outlawed for private use. But McArthur was soon involved in the war effort. ”In 1940 alone, he outfitted 40 vessels,” Mr. Brown said. ”He designed 500 models for aircraft seating. In fact, he probably did at least 65 percent of all the aircraft seating for World War II, for the Navy and also for the Army Air Corps, which later became the Air Force.” After the war, things did not go so well, and he closed his factory in 1948.