WALTER VON NESSEN Important armchair and ott

Provenance
Mr. and Mrs. Glendon Allvine, Long Beach, New York;
Delorenzo Gallery, New York;
Lot 434, Furniture from America's First Modernistic Home, The Delorenzo Collection, Christie's, New York, October 4, 1980;
Lot 299, Sotheby's, New York, December 6, 1986;
Lot 238, The Collecting Eye of Seymour Stein, Sotheby's, New York, December 11, 2003

In 1927 on a visit to Paris, Glendon Allvine was exposed to the designs of Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Walter Gropius and returned to the United States intent on building a house along the Modernist principles he had experienced in Europe. In 1929 the Allvines worked with architect Warren Shepard Matthews to build a stark white stucco house in Long Beach, Long Island, immediately heralded by the New York press as "America's first modern home." As head of Advertising and Publicity at the Fox Film Corporation, Allvine had access to top American designers. He commissioned Donald Deskey, Paul T. Frankl, Walter von Nessen and others to create avant-garde furnishings to harmonize with the clean, straight lines of the house's exterior. The present lot is one of the original pieces from the Allvine home. Walter von Nessen's simple yet luxurious streamlined design clearly embodies Allvine's desire to create an emblem of Modernism within an American context.