The Modern Chair was an exhibition at the ICA, curated by Linda Brown and Deyan Sudjic. It featured Ron Arad, Bernard Breuer, Jane Dillon, Floris van den Broeke, Nigel Coates, Robin Day, Charles & Jane Dillon, Tom Dixon, Andre Dubreuil, Zaha Hadid, Matthew Hilton, Hollington Associates, Jan Kaplicky, Perry King & Santiago Miranda and Rodney Kinsman, among others. Jasper showed the Thinking Man’s Chair.
Paul Barker wrote a scathing review of the exhibition in the Evening Standard (photocopy above), under the strapline, ‘Arty furniture can be weird, wonderful...or a pain in the backside’. The review was flanked by the famous 1963 photograph of Christine Keeler naked on an Arne Jacobsen chair, and a Thinking Man’s Chair. Barker made the criticism that ‘The last thing a designer thinks a chair is for is to be comfortable in’. He described the Thinking Man’s Chair as ‘a creation in bent iron that looks just like some medieval instrument of torture’.
The exhibition’s catalogue.
Jasper and his flatmate Duncan Ward were riled by Paul Barker’s facetious review of the exhibition. Using the pen name Rex Dunbar, Duncan typed a fiery riposte to Barker on the back of a photocopy of the review. ‘I am amused by your smug intolerance’, he wrote. He went on to defend the Thinking Man’s Chair’s give: ‘Had you sat in it, your understanding would have been a lot better. It is made out of sprung steel which gives accordingly to ones weight and is exceptionally comfortable. I own two and have spent many comfortable and profitable hours sitting in them, as has my cat.’