Simple Furniture and All That: Gerald Summers and the 1930s Plywood Renaissance in London

Inspired by the highly anticipated 2024 publication of Gerald Summers & Marjorie Butcher: Makers of Simple Furniture, 1931-1940, authored by the design historian Martha Deese, R & Company presents an exhibition of recent acquisitions of furniture by the British designer Gerald Summers (1899-1967) and the modernist architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), designed and made between 1934 and 1939 in London. 

There were nearly as many threads connecting Summers and Breuer as the seven sheets of plywood which formed his iconic and organic bent plywood armchair. While Summers and his wife Marjorie sold his designs through their own firm, Makers of Simple Furniture, Summers also designed a trolley for Isokon, the progressive company and community founded by Jack Pritchard, where Breuer lived and worked. Both designers had their pieces retailed through Heal’s, the London furniture store, whose motto, “Heal’s Economy Furniture for 1932 and All That,” epitomized British self-effacement towards both modernism and the Depression.  

The important and rare plywood designs on view capture the spirit of the London avant-garde that briefly flourished until the outbreak of the Second World War.

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Wall color generously provided by Alkemis Paint.