Estelle & Erwine Laverne Originals Modern Rosewood Lamp Table Floor White 1950s

Description

Estelle and Erwine Laverne for Laverne originals - Tulip base rosewood lamp table floor lamp. Maker’s mark on underside. Extremely … more Estelle and Erwine Laverne for Laverne originals - Tulip base rosewood lamp table floor lamp. Maker’s mark on underside. Extremely rare example of a piece by E & E Laverne that includes wood of any sort (rosewood) alongside the non-traditional materials for which they are most known. I cannot underscore how exceptionally rare this piece is within the Estelle and Erwine’s oeuvre. It most probably dates from the between the years 1960-1961, as the weighted tulip base is reminiscent of their Champagne chair and the central table evocative of their cafe table that was a part of the Lily collection of the late 1950’s. Dimensions: H 43.5 inches, W 11.75 inches, D 11.75 inches. ‘The Invisibles” by Elaine M. Salkaln (from the April 18, 2004 New York Times) On the surface, this is a simple design story of a husband-and-wife team, Estelle and Erwine Laverne, who produced exceptionally beautiful, innovative midcentury-modern wallpapers, fabrics and furniture -- designs that are rare today, yet coveted by a few specialized dealers and aficionados. But the story goes deeper -- to a convergence of culture, class, art and love. Sadly, though, the love gets caught up in the grittier details, transforming what would have been a grand romance into a modern American tragedy. Were this a docudrama, it would begin with a scene from the filming of the sci-fi fantasy ''Men in Black II'': in the center of a glass-walled, ultramodern, living room swarming with cameramen, lighting and booms, a little dog jumps up and down on the seat of a tall, sensuously sculptured clear acrylic chair. The chair, as it happens, is a star in this story. Known as the Lily, it was designed and manufactured by the Lavernes in the late 1950's, but it might as easily be on the cutting edge of design today. The back rises to a rounded point at the top and flares out at the seat, like an about-to-burst lily bud -- its transparency and reflectiveness giving it the look of a crystal jewel. It is the tallest of four Invisible chairs, the others being Jonquil, Buttercup and Daffodil. Rita Reif, who wrote about design for The Times in those years, gave the Invisibles a rave in a 1958 article. She said recently: ''I knew immediately what it was, how innovative: it was the first time we saw full-fledged modern design in acrylic. Helena Rubinstein had clear plastic furniture in the 30's, but it was more traditional. This was so light and airy. Dreamlike. And so amusing. Really the most important thing they ever did.'' She interviewed the Lavernes many times over the years, and told me: ''They were very close. You usually saw them together.'' In Reif's article, Erwine Laverne, a tall, imposing man with a strong ego, joked about his latest invention: ''Maybe we're designing ourselves out of business.'' It was a remark, like others he would make, that had a portentous ring. He told Reif that ''the most important element in rooms is people, not furniture.'' Hence, the invisibility. At the height of their success, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Lavernes produced -- besides furniture -- 90 hand-printed fabrics and wallpaper patterns (their own and those of others), and their headquarters, at 160 East 57th Street, commanded a network of satellite showrooms across the country. They were also well-known interior designers, having put together the East Side town house of the film director Otto Preminger, the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas and corporate offices for Ford and General Motors. Unlike their competitors, they were hands-on in all phases of the work -- the designing, manufacturing, selling, promoting and advertising. Estelle, being the more poetic of the two, wrote the imaginative copy and named the designs. Their showroom, with its walls and half walls, concealed spaces and exotic materials, was more art gallery than sales floor. It was described in a nine-page spread in a 1952 issue of Interiors as a ''piece of sculpture'' that was ''too pure to support any mundane transactions like selling.'' In designing the space, they were assisted by three young men -- William Katavolos, Ross Littell and Douglas Kelley -- whom they had hired to help design their first efforts at furniture: an award-winning line of Bauhaus-inspired stainless-steel-and-leather seating, the star of which was a stunning three-legged leather sling lounge with a T-stretcher. ''Space was as important to them as the items in it,'' said the oldest of their three sons, Avrom Laverne, known as Avi, now 68. He spoke with me recently with an understandably bittersweet reluctance to discuss the past, because of the tragedy that eventually befell his parents, but nevertheless with a fierce pride. The showroom's most spectacular wall was Erwine's mural titled ''Marbalia,'' a sweeping swath of oversize faux marble, hand-printed in glowing colors, that looked like a giant abstract painting (and in today's art world would be considered one). It was first shown in Belgium in 1951 in an exhibition of modern design, and it was greatly admired for its technique, which no one could fathom. ''It was sheer technical virtuosity,'' Avi said. ''A secret process my father developed.'' He continued: ''When he was young, my father studied in Paris at L'École des Beaux-Arts, and he became expert there in marbelizing and wood grain. In an international competition'' -- the 1929 art exposition in Brussels -- ''he won a Gold Medal awarded to him by the king of Belgium.'' It was the Lavernes' solid foundation in the Fine arts that distinguished them from their contemporaries at the time -- Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Arne Jacobsen and George Nelson, all of whom were architects or Industrial designers. (Harry Bertoia and Isamu Noguchi were exceptions; both were sculptors who designed their pieces for Knoll.) As artists, they dreamed up a form and then found a technical way to make it, rather than starting with a function or a problem that needed to be solved. In fact, it was art that had brought them together. Estelle Lester and Erwine Laverne met in 1932, in the cafeteria of the Art Students League in New York, where they both were studying painting with the venerable Hans Hofmann, who taught the likes of Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Marisol and Larry Rivers. In his essay ''Plastic Creation,''published in the Art Students League's journal, Hofmann talks about how ''space is filled with movement.'' And you immediately see his influence on the Lavernes' work, especially Estelle's 1948 fabric Fun to Run, which was shown that year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a stellar example of Fine arts applied to handicraft. Its inspiration was Matisse's ''Dance.'' Back in the Depression, however, art had to take a back seat to commerce. After marrying in 1934, they needed to earn a living. Both had come from families of artisans -- Estelle's dad was a jewelry designer; Erwine's father, an itinerant painter and decorator who traveled the country painting murals in churches and synagogues, often enlisting his sons to paint the backgrounds. Once, when a hand-printed wallpaper failed to arrive from France, the family decided to make it themselves. And so Erwine and his brother Louis, along with a friend, Jackson Ellis, started a hand-printed-wallpaper business. (Another brother, Philip LaVerne -- who adopted a different spelling for his surname -- along with his son, Kelvin, produced elegant high-end tables and chests with exotic patinated bronze and pewter doors that today go for as much as $50,000 at auction.) In 1942, a fortuitous encounter at Macy's gave the Lavernes a huge career boost: Erwine was shopping for cork place mats to be used instead of linen, and he became disgusted with the selections. A salesman identified himself as a Macy's vice president and challenged him to do better. The next day Laverne returned with his sketches and received such an enthusiastic response that Macy's ran a full-page ad for them in The New York Times. Orders poured in. Thousands were sold, and the place mats expanded to matching fabrics and wallpapers, so that by the end of the 40's, the Lavernes were riding high. This was just about the time that the couple asked Alexander Calder to make a mobile for the living room of their new Long Island dream house, on the Tiffany estate, in tony Laurel Hollow. There, on their 111 1/82 acres of waterfront property -- which included a carriage house, servants' quarters, a pond with an island and a footbridge -- they would set up a kind of artistic utopia, converting some of the spaces, including what had once been a bowling alley, into ateliers where they could hand-screen their fabrics while inviting artists to live and work. In fact, when Calder came out to construct the mobile, he was so turned on by this beehive of creativity that he also designed two wallpaper patterns for the Lavernes, which remained in the line until the end. Calder installed the mobile high up in front of the vast living room's brick fireplace, which the Lavernes had painted blue. The living room opened onto a courtyard surrounded by buildings, many initially stables, and there was a fountain in the center like an omphalos -- the point the ancient Greeks used to mark the center of the earth. The Lavernes moved into the carriage house in 1948, when Laurelton Hall -- the magnificent Tiffany mansion with more than 80 rooms and 26 baths -- was still intact. This was Louis Comfort Tiffany's summer home. His father, the founder of Tiffany & Company, died in 1902, leaving his son a huge fortune, and the younger Tiffany spared no expense in completing the house in 1906. As with the Lavernes, art had been Tiffany's passion: he had studied painting with George Inness and formed his own business, Tiffany Studios. His iridescent Favrile glass, wisteria lampshades and stained-glass murals were world famous. Much of his work adorned the house and was still in place when the Lavernes arrived, like ''The Bathers,'' an exquisite stained-glass window of female nudes. But by the time Tiffany died in 1933, his design studio had gone bust, and his lamps were passé. To preserve the estate, he had it deeded to his foundation as a center for artists. During World War II, however, taxes skyrocketed, so that after the war the estate was broken up and the gardens left to fall fallow. To the Lavernes, however, it was heaven. Erwine could paint in a room overlooking the same wisteria-rimmed pond that had inspired Tiffany's most beautiful glass, and Estelle, who painted and wrote poetry -- ''Caution me/To turn and flee/If temptation/Takes a hold of me'' -- even volunteered to teach art at a local school. A high school friend of Avi's, Owen Olney, fondly remembers visiting the compound, awestruck by it all: ''There were big wooden gates, and they had an aluminum Grumman canoe, which we paddled around the pond.'' The family also owned a very unusual twin-wing Swedish sailboat, with a rotating mast that did away with the ropes and pulleys that make sailing such a rigorous sport. My husband lived with his family in the area, and he recalls watching the Lavernes go out in their sailboat as the neighbors onshore would snicker. With the flick of a wrist, the sail would be up, and the Lavernes would be off and sailing. Which was not how the members of the exclusive Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club did things. No, the Lavernes were not their kind. At one point, early on, Erwine's family had changed the name from Levine to Laverne. Estelle, who wore black ballet shoes and arty, one-of-a-kind jewelry, didn't shop for country tweeds at the Hitching Post. Like Tiffany, they were rank individualists among mostly traditionalists. It was about 1952 when the village issued the Lavernes a restraining order to cease and desist the manufacturing of wallpaper in a residential zone. The Lavernes maintained that what they did -- screen-printing -- was a handicraft, a major distinction. Manufacturing wallpaper entailed a large factory and heavy machinery. And so began what would be many years of litigation that drained their coffers and eventually split the family apart. In the beginning, however, it was merely an annoyance. After all, they reasoned, the art studios had been ''grandfathered in'' by Tiffany, who, like the Lavernes themselves, invited artists to live on the estate every summer. And at one point, during the war, the estate had also functioned as a secret base for Army artists making camouflage patterns. But the Lavernes were not the Tiffanys, and in that distinction lay the seeds of their destruction. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, in the late 1960's, where it was refused a hearing. ''They got the best law firms in New York to go after them,'' Avi said. ''But my parents stood there and fought.'' At one point the couple won on a related issue that made case history in the New York State Court of Appeals. But the trauma of fighting the case -- the years of mounting litigation costs and the damage done to their company when they lost their focus -- was their ruin. Estelle fell ill with a form of multiple sclerosis and never walked again -- ironic, for the designer whose most famous fabric was Fun to Run. The couple died penniless in a nursing home: Estelle in 1997 at age 82, and Erwin six years later -- last September -- at 94. They are buried in the family plot in Clifton, N.J. I prefer not to dwell on their sad end, but to remember the Joy -- Estelle's name for their sailboat -- and the lighter-than-air quality of their most illustrious chair, delicate and exuberant, like the Lavernes themselves. less