Center Table

In 1942, the collector Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Frederick Kiesler, a Viennese architect, artist, and designer, to remodel two shops on West 57th Street in Manhattan for her now-legendary gallery Art of This Century. Guggenheim envisioned a space that would be as avant-garde as the art she would show, and Kiesler responded with a series of four distinctive spaces where paintings were suspended in midair or on adjustable arms mounted on curving walls, while other works were seen through a peephole while turning a large wooden spiral.

Kiesler also designed a collection of multifunctional furniture for the gallery, including the Correalist Rocker on display here. Playing on the name and shifting forms of Surrealism, the avant-garde twentieth-century art and literary movement, the Correalist Rocker could be used as a chair or, when oriented differently, as an easel for paintings, a pedestal for sculpture, a bench, or a table (see image). The design demonstrated Kiesler’s belief in the integral relationship between an object and its environment whereby “sculpture, painting, architecture should not be used as wedges to split our experience of art and life; they are here to link, to correlate, to bind dream and reality.”