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Ward Bennett with his 1968 Scissor Chair, a popular design manufactured by Brickel, said to be his most comfortable chair. Shown here in wood and leather, the Scissor is also manufactured in steel. Image courtesy of Sollo Rago Modern Auctions.

Ward Bennett: The designer’s designer

Catherine Saunders-Watson
Catherine Saunders-Watson

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BY SUSAN BRANDABUR
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Ward Bennett with his 1968 Scissor Chair, a popular design manufactured by Brickel, said to be his most comfortable chair.
Shown here in wood and leather, the Scissor is also manufactured in steel. Image courtesy of Sollo Rago Modern Auctions.

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A name to look for in postwar American design on the secondary market is Ward Bennett.

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His furniture and objects have a subtlety of line and richness of materials that give them a timeless presence. Bennett is hailed by other designers as an enormous influence (among his assistants was design star Joe D’Urso), and he received honors that included a place in Interior Design Magazine’s Hall of Fame, but so far there has not a published monograph devoted to his work.

Bennett designed furniture, glassware (Tiffany, Sasaki), lighting (Harry Gitlin) and metalwork (Tiffany and Supreme Cutlery), as well as houses (including several residences for publisher Jann Wenner and his own small weekend house in Amagansett). He also created interiors for clients like the Agnellis and the Rockefellers.  He was in-house designer for the American furniture company Brickel beginning in 1964 and for Geiger – the company that purchased Brickel – beginning in 1987. Geiger still manufactures Bennett’s designs.

A set of 12 Ward Bennett armchairs with steel frames, leather arm panels, adjustable backs and custom French gaufrage fabric. Image courtesy of Sollo Rago Modern Auctions.
A set of 12 Ward Bennett armchairs with steel frames, leather arm panels, adjustable backs and custom French gaufrage fabric. Image courtesy of Sollo Rago Modern Auctions.

Timothy deFiebre was Ward Bennett’s assistant in the 1980s and is now the primary custodian of the designer’s legacy. He believes a confluence of factors may have contributed to Bennett’s relative obscurity outside of interior design circles.

Bennett was born into a poor family in Manhattan’s Washington Heights and went to work at the age of 13 in the garment industry. Prodigiously gifted, he tried his hand at fashion illustration, window design, millinery, jewelry and sculpture, even studying with Constantin Brancusi in Paris as a youth, before gaining prominence as a designer of objects and interiors.

A Ward Bennett two-tier marble console with steel frame. Image courtesy of Sollo Rago Modern Auctions.
A Ward Bennett two-tier marble console with steel frame. Image courtesy of Sollo Rago Modern Auctions.

“Having once been poor, when he began to make money as a designer Ward did not devote a lot of attention to creating an archive,” said deFiebre. “Also, because he was self taught, his design methods did not lend themselves to conventional documentation.”
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The Banker Series for Brickel from 1980 is a good encapsulation of Bennett’s style and is one of the series most admired by interior designers. The curving lines evoke a traditional design, but the pieces are very simple and pared down to a modernist minimum. In a  popular fabrication, warm cherrywood frames are contrasted with sleek black leather upholstery; Bennett was known for his juxtapositions of industrial materials with organic ones. His I-beam-shape table base anticipated the high-tech movement.

One of Ward Bennett's designs for Sasaki, a thick-walled black glass vase, its rim etched with circles, squares, and triangles. John Sollo says 'the market for 20th-century design has expanded to encompass even more recent designs, like the later work of Ward Bennett.' Image courtesy of Sollo Rago Modern Auctions.
One of Ward Bennett’s designs for Sasaki, a thick-walled black glass vase, its rim etched with circles, squares, and triangles. John Sollo says ‘the market for 20th-century design has expanded to encompass even more recent designs, like the later work of Ward Bennett.’ Image courtesy of Sollo Rago Modern Auctions.

A unique American artist and designer who started from nothing and succeeded through sheer talent and hard work at seemingly everything he tried, Ward Bennett died in 2003 at the age of 85. In his New York Times obituary, writer Julie V. Iovine wrote: “His own apartment, carved in 1962 from a warren of maids’ rooms tucked under the rooftop gables of the majestic Dakota building on the Upper West Side, was legendary in the world of New York interiors and was in the news every time he redecorated it.” In 1964, George O’Brien, who reported on home furnishings in The New York Times Magazine, had described it as “the most exciting modern apartment in New York.”
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