Artist

Marcel Breuer

1902–1981 · Hungarian-American

Marcel Breuer moved from Bauhaus student to Bauhaus master in five years, and from tubular-steel furniture to poured-concrete buildings across the following four decades. Born in Pécs, Hungary, he trained under Gropius, emigrated first to London and then to the United States in 1937, and built the Whitney Museum, Saint John's Abbey, and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

Breuer treated furniture and architecture as one continuous problem. The bent-tubular Wassily and cantilevered Cesca chairs argued that a piece of furniture could be as structural as a building; his later concrete work carried the same logic upward.