This iconic, cat-adorned Eames fiberglass chair can be yours for $2,500
In 1950, Romanian American artist Saul Steinberg, whose sharp and whimsical illustrations have graced more than 80 New Yorker covers, spontaneously picked up a brush and painted drawings on various furniture items, floors, and walls of Charles and Ray Eames’s Los Angeles office. One of these drawings depicted a woman, wearing nothing but a necklace and heels, reclining on an early prototype of La Chaise. Another was a sleeping cat, snuggled into the shell of the now iconic Eames Fiberglass Armchair.
Both of these chairs still exist today—the nude is on permanent loan from the Eames Institute to the Vitra Design Museum, and the cat is part of the Eames Institute Collection. But for the first time, a replica of one of them can now be yours for $2,500.
The Eames Fiberglass Armchair with Steinberg Cat has been reproduced in a limited edition of 500. Three hundred of those are available in Europe and the Middle East through Vitra; 180 are distributed by Herman Miller and available in North America; and 20 are available in Japan.
“The reintroduction is a celebration of Charles and Ray Eames and Saul Steinberg as friends, contemporaries, and artists who had a hand in shaping culture while traversing the line between the utilitarian and high art,” says Ben Watson, president of Herman Miller.
To achieve a faithful replica, the Eames Institute hired a company to scan the original chair and create a 3D model of the shape and the drawing. After that, each chair was hand-painted by an artisan in Germany, sealed with protective paint, and numbered by hand. The drawing was used with permission of the Saul Steinberg Foundation, which was established by the artist in his will.
The cat-adorned armchair is a lasting symbol of the relationship between the designers and the artist, which is also relayed in an exhibition from the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity that launched at the same time as the chair. Aptly titled Steinberg Meets the Eameses, the exhibition details how Steinberg came to know Charles and Ray Eames, starting with a failed Hollywood assignment—playing a “hand double” for Gene Kelly in An American in Paris—that drove him to the West Coast.
Once there, Steinberg began to socialize with the Eameses, culminating in a series of collaborations for which Steinberg was given free rein to turn parts of the Eames Office into his own canvas. Steinberg painted many drawings, but it’s not all that surprising that the team chose to reproduce the fiberglass chair with the cat.
The Eames fiberglass chairs were the world’s first industrially mass-produced chairs with a seat and backrest formed from a single composite shell. The cat was one of Steinberg’s preferred subjects, with no fewer than seven of his New Yorker covers featuring a feline focal point. “In one picture, it is most representative of his rich imagination brought to life through drawing,” Watson says.
Now, the fruit of their collaboration can forever live on in the home of a design lover who may or may not be a cat lady.
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