Chairs. Dieckmann!

For the first time in over 30 years, a major solo exhibition is featuring furniture designer Erich Dieckmann (1896–1944), who taught at the Bauhaus and the arts and crafts school at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle (Saale). The exhibition – featuring some 120 pieces of furniture, graphics, designs and drawings, as well as contemporary works based on Dieckmann’s approach to design – pays tribute to an influential designer who, like Marcel Breuer, experimented with forms and materials and developed series of modular furniture using rigorously geometric forms. The exhibition can be viewed in Berlin and Halle (Saale), the two cities where Dieckmann’s impact was greatest. Erich Dieckmann and the Bauhaus Erich Dieckmann came to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1921 to pursue a carpentry apprenticeship. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, Dieckmann stayed at the successor institution, the Staatliche Bauhochschule Weimar, directed by Otto Bartning. He became head of the carpentry workshop there that same year. In 1931 Dieckmann followed many former Bauhaus instructors to the school of arts and crafts at Burg Giebichenstein, where he oversaw the carpentry workshop from 1931 until his dismissal by the National Socialists in 1933. He then struggled, seriously ill, to make ends meet with administrative and consultant jobs until his death in November 1944 at the age of 48. Dieckmann’s attitude towards and involvement in National Socialism can only be reconstructed fragmentarily and therefore needs to be closely scrutinised.