Although under-recognized until recently, Italian-born Lina Bo Bardi was a seminal figure in modern Brazilian architecture and design in the mid-20th century. Bo Bardi and her husband Pietro, an art critic and journalist, moved to Brazil in 1946, where she took citizenship in 1951. She developed her own style of modernism that combined elements of the International Style with her deep engagement with the culture, society, politics, and indigenous design traditions of her adopted country of Brazil. The Bowl Chair is composed of a four-legged circular steel frame that supports an independent upholstered shell seat with two cushions that could rest at numerous reclining angles on the frame to suit the desired position of the sitter. Designed in 1951, the Bowl Chair reveals her interest in both geometric simplicity and her investigations into the proportions and positions of the human body, which she called a “process of humanization of art.” Given Bo Bardi’s deep engagement with Afro-Brazilian democratic culture and aesthetics and her belief in the social and cultural potential of architecture and design, it has been postulated that she modeled her famed Bowl Chair on the form of old copper sugar boiling cauldrons used on Brazilian sugar plantations by enslaved laborers. Although highly acclaimed in Bo Bardi’s lifetime, original examples of the Bowl Chair are quiet rare—only 4 authentic examples are known in the United States. This example has excellent provenance—descended in the family of Bo Bardi’s friend and fellow architect Henrique Verona Cristofani (1916-2007), and is also accompanied by a certificate of authentication and technical analysis from the Instituto Lina Bo Bardi / Casa de Vidro.

---