Karl Springer LTD

KARL SPRINGER LTD

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Todd Merrill & Associates, Inc. 80 Lafayette Street New York, NY 10013 www.toddmerrillstudio.com Printed in the United States of America Karl Springer LTD Karl Springer LTD / Todd Merrill.

Book design by Dallas Dunn Photography by Simon Leung

KARL SPRINGER LTD. Self published by Todd Merrill Studio

Exclusive Karl Springer Designs reissued through Todd Merrill Studio Todd Merrill, a preeminent dealer in 20th and 21st century studio furniture and art, has chosen a selection of Karl Springer’s most iconic designs to be reissued exclusively at his gallery, Todd Merrill Studio, in partnership with Mark Eckman, President of Karl Springer Ltd. Today, the reissues are available through Todd Merrill Studio exclusively on a commission basis, with custom dimensions, materials, and finishes available.

In 2016, Eckman, an admirer of Merrill’s intuition and experience in the vintage marketplace, approached the gallery in order to give exclusive rights to reissue Merrill’s hand-picked collection of Springer’s timeless classics, “I wanted to perpetuate iconic Karl Springer designs that epitomize the glamorous look that Springer created,” says Todd Merrill.

Today, Karl Springer Ltd. upholds the tradition started by its namesake founder in the early 1970s to create bench made pieces with authentic materials, superb craftsmanship, and extreme attention to detail. The entire collection is American made by some of the same artisans who originally worked with Springer himself. “The quality of the reissued work is equal or superior to the original pieces as

technique and technology have advanced” noted Eckman.

Eckman first met Springer in the mid-1970s when he was an inhouse designer for a Lucite fabricating company in northern Manhattan. At the time, Springer was seeking a Lucite source for his lamps, boxes and mounted objects --details that would come to define many of his unique designs.

When Karl Springer Ltd. relocated to a small atelier on east 61st Street, Eckman and Springer collaborated on occasional tables to add to its growing line. This partnership continued as the business grew and their joint projects became more complex. In 1987, Springer hired Eckman as his assistant. They worked together until Springer’s death from AIDS in 1991 and Eckman left the company the following year. In 1994, Eckman acquired the rights to Karl Springer Ltd, including intellectual property, design, logo and trademarks.

Over the years, Eckman has been a vital source to provide authentication, appraisal and repair services for original Springer pieces.

FREEFORM LOW TABLE

The Free Form Low Table, was the first piece created under the gallery’s collaboration with Karl Springer Studio. Available in three forms, the height of each Free Form Low Table design is customizable from 14”- 18” inches. Sleek and elegant, the low table is set on hidden recessed casters allowing it to move and pivot with ease. Made in Springer’s exact original design, the Free Form Low Table is available by commission in stainless steel, brass, or polished bronze, as well as lacquered goatskin in a variety of colorways. Clear, white, or black glass tops can also be accommodated.

Originally created in the 1970s during the designer’s showroom expansion to a 20,000 square-foot penthouse on East 61st street, the free-form table is one of Springer’s most iconic designs in his extensive body of work.

Springer worked to perfect the shape of each table. The prototypes were made in polished stainless steel, subsiquently with a ¾” black or white glass top.

Small (bottom right) 33W x 23L x 14 -18H inches Medium (bottom left) 46W x 26L x 14-18H inches Large (top) 49W x 33L x 14-18H inches

Small size shown in stainless steel

Medium size shown in royal bronze

Large size shown in lacquered goatskin

SCULPTURE LOW TABLE

Karl Springer’s over-scaled, enigmatic Sculpture Low Table is created with a surface of free-form inlay of natural goatskin with a polished lacquered finish. Given the complexity of the design only around six examples of the Sculpture Table were ever produced. This complex table is a tribute to Springer’s unsurpassed craftsmanship.

The Sculpture Low Table is available by commission for custom orders in a variety of sizes and a choice of ten colorways of goatskin.

60 W x 40 D x 22.5 H inches

Lacquered Goatskin Plinth Low Table Shown Dimensions: 17.5H x 63W x 63D, 13-inch top / 4.5-inch base

Lacquered Goatskin Low Parsons Table Shown Dimensions: 16.5H x 55W x 40D inches

Monumental Goatskin Dining Table

The exquisite dining table, made of freeform inlay natural goatskin in warm pearl grey, features classic Art Deco lines, the round base blossoms into four elegant pillars that support the monumental three inch thick circular top. The table is finished in a polished lacquer. Springer is often credited with reviving the art of applying skins to furniture, a practice long associated with French Deco masters including Jean Michel Frank, Jean Dunand, and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Able to seat up to twelve people, the table is an iconic Springer design and a fantastic example of his signature works in which elegant forms and proportions meet opulent materials and finishes.

Shown Dimensions: 30H x 72D inches

Freeform Goatskin Dining Table

The Freeform Dining Table with Goatskin Top combines Springer’s classic 1970s Freeform Low Table design with a custom lacquered goatskin top. Sleek and elegant, the mirror-polished bronze table bases are set on hidden, recessed casters so they may move and pivot with ease.

The bases can be customized to specific heights in stainless steel, bronze, brass, or covered with lacquered goat skin. The top of the table can also be custom ordered in a variety of sizes, forms, and colors.

Shown Dimensions: 30 H x 72 W x 70D inches

Sculpture Leg Table

A cylindrical bronze base and a cantilevered fan-shaped or rectangular glass top, creates a striking equilibrium between its light, floating effect and its weighted solid metal base.

As they are available by commission, custom finishes can be accommodated, including stainless steel, gunmetal, royal bronze, amongst others. Signature stamp is marked on the eye below the cap. The glass tops can be commission in a fan shape or a rectangular shape.

Shown in polished bronze

Base: 10” Diameter x 19”H Glass: 19” x 19” x 1”

Shown in polished nickel

Shown in royal bronze (left) and polished bronze (right)

Onassis Chair in Goatskin

Originally designed for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis the iconic the Onassis Chairs and Barstools feature a barrel back , semi-circular arm rests that embraces the body, and a bronze footrest. Available in laquered goatskin, laquered wood, or a variety of wood finishes.

Shown Dimensions: 30H x 22.5W x 18D inches, with a 18-inch seat height

Onassis Counter Stool in Goatskin Shown Dimensions: 36H x 26W x 19D inches, with a 25-inch seat height

Pullman Sofa

The Pullman Sofa features a wrap around, flat back that curves gently into armrests. Its low profile and rich, book-matched zebra-wood epitomize the Art Deco renaissance of the late 1970s. Custom dimensions and materials may be accommodated.

30H x 96W x 40D inches

Royal Palm Cabinet

Karl Springer’s Royal Palm Cabinet features an inlay grid of lacquered goatskin. The four-door cabinet has adjustable shelves and a silverware drawer. The Royal Palm Cabinet is available to commission in a variety of 10 colorways. The interior, in mahogany veneer, can be stained to match the colorway of the goatskin. Custom dimensions and materials may be accommodated.

34H x 84W x 22D inches

Sculpture Bench

The elegant and timeless Sculpture Bench exemplifies the artist’s penchant for integrating sleek lines with exotic skins and finishes, creating unique sculptural designs that are at once beautiful as they are functional. The shown model features an alligator embossed black two-tone glazed calfskin.

Shown dimension 24H x 72W x 20D inches

Available on a commission basis, custom dimensions and materials are available, including brass, steel, or lacquered goatskin.

Sonnenteller (Sun Plate) Mirror Polished Stainless Steel or Bronze

This unique sculpture debuted in 1979 and is said to have been inspired by a sun mask from the African art collection of one of Springer’s friends. It was originally made in two sizes and available in both polished stainless steel and polished bronze.

The commanding sculpture is displayed on an granite base.

Karl Springer LTD pieces are available exclusively through Todd Merrill Studio on a commission basis. Custom dimensionality and materials may be accommodated.

Large: 38” Diameter Small: 26” Diameter

Karl Springer Apartment, circa1989

KARL SPRINGER 1931-1991 From window dresser and bookbinder to major designer and couture furniture manufacturer, Karl Springer captured the spirit of his age, the raging 1970s and ’80s. He was inspired by the deco classics from another indulgent period, the 1920s, but by taking advantage of a convergence possible only in New York—of free-flowing cash and the inexpensive labor of recent emigrants possessing old-world craft skills—Springer was able to transform existing styles into his own distinctive expressions.

Though born in prewar Germany and working off European classical forms, Springer developed an irreverent and non-doctrinaire idiom of bold proportions, highly exotic finishes, and a sometimes flashy palette that identified him strongly with his American clientele. His work spoke with the confidence and energy of the highest-end productions associated with the disco decade. With his death from complications of AIDS in 1989, Springer joined the tragically swelling ranks of designers felled by that scourge in those years. Above all, furnishings by Springer, whether python-covered desk accessories or a shagreen dining table, possessed the verve and contemporary glamour of enduringly popular classics.

Karl Springer was born in Berlin in 1931. His family background has never been part of his story, apart from references to his study of bookbinding and working as a window dresser at a prominent Berlin clothier. He arrived in New York in the late fifties, following a brief stint in California; his exit from Germany—the details of which remained vague—was probably arranged with the help of a gay American military officer. Aged twenty-six and with no formal training, Springer found work styling windows at Lord & Taylor.

Eager to move on, he started applying his bookbinding skills to making animal skin–covered jewel boxes, desk accessories, and telephone tables.

His work attracted the attention of a buyer for Bergdorf Goodman and, in a story he told often, a snake skin phone table caught the eye of the Duchess

of Windsor, whose patronage quickly moved Springer and his expanding line of furnishings onto a society fast track, where he reveled in keeping pace.

Springer opened a small shop on First Avenue, wrapping leather, applying faux finishes, and working for decorators interested in intriguing accent pieces.

He then moved to East Fifty-third Street, known as Boutique Row, where the backrooms were crowded with refugees from Europe and Asia adept in refined craft skills—such as lacquering, batiking, and leather-work that were not particularly common to American furniture making, rooted as it was in more basic Colonial-style paint finishes and carving.

As his career flourished, Springer’s own homes were a most convincing showcase of his evolving sensibility. From a sky-lit artist’s studio at the top of a Gramercy Park townhouse, where a bedroom was squeezed into a hallway and a cabinet was retooled from an antique confessional that appeared in the New York Times in 1967, to the plush apartment on the forty-fifth floor of an Upper East Side tower published in Architectural Digest in 1989, these homes displayed his flair for glamour without ostentation. If the earlier place showed off Springer’s early ingenuity, the latter featured the extraordinary range of his aesthetic interests. There was a Chinese antique drum as a side table, alongside an Ashanti stool, a sixteenth-century Italian wrought-iron chest, and an eighteenth-century gold-leafed Japanese screen. The wellendowed proportions of his own upholstered pieces, metal tube lamps, and lacquered tables added muscle to this precious, eclectic collection. And a final layer of gloss came with walls and ceilings lined in antiqued copper-leaf and mirrored window niches. Even the closets were lined with lacquered bird’s-eye maple, and his Lucite headboard was illuminated. The writer for Architectural Digest attributed a “well-burnished masculinity” to the place that was yachtlike while the silver-maned Springer himself came across as an adventuresome sea captain.

Certainly, Springer was an omnivore of world styles and rare techniques well before globe-trotting became the favorite pastime of decorators in search of inspiration. He focused especially on materials with texture, from Japanese prints to African mud cloths, and his showrooms were stacked with such exotic finds as ostrich eggs and Venetian hand-blown glass. But his real signature was furniture covered in lacquered skins: goat, lizard, alligator, fossilized coral, shark, cobra, and even frog. He is often credited with having revived the fad for shagreen, long associated with such French deco masters as Jean-Michel Frank, Jean Dunand, and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. The Springer look, however, didn’t derive from deco alone; it borrowed as well from ancient Greek and chinoiserie motifs, pumping up and simplifying familiar shapes, then reinvigorating them with exotic finishes in unusual colors (purple python was a favorite). “I may be inspired by other designers,” he told Architectural Digest in the late eighties, “but the interpretations are strictly my own.” It was a significant break from the more staid interior fashions of the day that tended toward ball-and-claw Americana, French Louis-by-the-numbers, and pervasive beige.

Sculpture Bench, Karl Springer Catalog Circa 1980

Mark Eckman, an industrial designer who worked for Springer in the sixties, specializing in making Lucite furniture, described Springer’s style in an interview as “crude chic,” noting that the designer “liked the material to be really out there, screaming.” Gutsy simplicity remained Springer’s hallmark.

His most iconic pieces resonated with a sense of history while striking a clear contemporary note. One of his earliest classics, the JMF chair, which he named after his idol, Jean-Michel Frank, possesses the clarity of classical form injected with Springer’s signature boldness. While the JMF chair was always very expensive, ranging from $1,400 to $2,200 according to Eckman, depending on the finish, it remained one of Springer’s most popular and in-demand pieces throughout the seventies. He made numerous variations using different materials: shiny black lacquer, veneered oak, a leather that could be either smooth or scored, and in later years shagreen with bone inlays. Belying its simple form, the JMF chair was extremely

difficult to make. It was pieced together without distracting decorative flourishes, resulting in an elegance that depended on seamless lines and flawless craftsmanship. Each piece took about a week to complete, and lacquer finishes could require as many as twenty coats. The Regina chair, with an upholstered seat and back within a wood frame, was another iconic piece, one reflecting the slightly less rigorous side to Springer’s later work and exhibiting his interest in ever-more-exotic finishes. But the most copied of all his pieces was most likely the telephone table on castors, with its slender proportions and two tiers with gallery edges. The originals, noted Eckman, were very low at twelve to fourteen inches, to stand alongside the low-slung slipper chairs made so popular by the decorator William Haines.

Springer was well attuned to society tastes, whether he was working for King Hussein or Tina Turner, Jackie Onassis or the soap-opera actress Loretta Young. When Diana Vreeland declared seashells were divine, no one was faster at coming up with a snazzy showstopper, such as a lamp with a seaurchin base, or an irresistible ostrich-feather pillow. While individual clients encouraged Springer to produce over-the-top, tour-de-force creations (for instance, interior decorator Jane Baum commissioned a coffee table with massive eight-inch-diameter legs carved entirely from Lucite), he was equally happy producing what he called “stock,” favorite pieces to have always on hand. That adaptable sensibility naturally endeared him to decorators at the highest end of the design spectrum, including Billy Baldwin, Valerian Rybar, Robert Metzer, and Jay Spectre.

Springer never advertised, and for a long time, his personal charisma— dashingly handsome even when his beard turned snowy white—was all that was needed to attract enough new business to keep a one-hundredperson-strong operation buoyant. At a charity auction in the eighties, Laurence Rockefeller declared furnishings by Springer to be the “antiques of tomorrow,” a declaration reflecting how costly they were even in their own day. In 1980, according to an article in the New York Times, a glass-topped table by Springer with a Lucite base cost $12,630, while a

Freeform Tables, Karl Springer Catalog Circa 1980

parchment-covered side chair covered in twenty-four coats of clear lacquer sold for $1,450.

Perhaps because he was self-taught, Springer tended to develop and convey his ideas for new furniture with models made of cardboard rather than drawings or blueprints. In this way, too, he could make on-the-spot alterations and variations as well as ornamental flourishes without concern for having to transpose his notions into a technical language that could be reproduced. Thus he was cleverly able to convert a shortcoming—his lack of training—into an asset, even a desirable commodity: “Because I insist on the same standards, there could never be any mass production in my workshops. We make one piece at a time,” he once told a design journalist.

While the main Karl Springer showroom was opened on East Sixty-third Street in 1969, the workshops, where pieces were assembled in several stages by different craft specialists, were scattered all around the city, and eventually around the world. He turned to a Japanese woman living in SoHo for linen lacquer and batik. On the Upper East Side, Chinese men (by the 1980s they were mostly Vietnamese) did lacquering and parchment. His lamp fitters were on Fifty-ninth Street, near York Avenue; in Queens, there was a woodworking shop; and among artists manqué in Manhattan, he found virtuoso faux painters. Nowhere other than New York would it have been possible to find so many different people trained in different skills from different traditions.

Springer’s product depended on all of their varying degrees of expertise, casting the designer himself into the role of constant quality-control master.

This subcontracting allowed for a unique freedom of expression, with styles liberated from traditional strictures, but it also led to unforeseen dependencies as the most talented craftspeople eventually wanted to spin off on their own, while the occasionally unscrupulous ones sold unauthorized copies or watered-down knockoffs on the side. Springer’s main workshop was managed in the seventies by Ron Seff, one of his closest friends who shared the designer’s zeal about quality control. In the early eighties, however, the two had a falling out, and Seff opened his own showroom where he produced variations on key Springer designs with slight alterations. For collectors, the situation is exacerbated by the fact that in the early years, Springer rarely signed pieces, only occasionally adding a leather flap stamped with his name. It was only in the late eighties that he introduced an official stamp for hides and sometimes engraved his name into Lucite; but signing for Springer was an inconsistent art.

Sculpture Table, Karl Springer LTD Catalog Circa 1980

Ultimately, and perhaps as a way to avoid such pitfalls as well as to get a handle on rising costs, Springer moved as much production as possible abroad. By 1983, at the height of his business, Springer furnishings were available not only in Manhattan but in showrooms in Los Angeles, Munich, and Tokyo. Lacquered goatskin pieces were made in Mexico; shagreen and

coral in the Philippines and Indonesia. Springer, whose lamps carved in Lucite and glass were especially popular, established a relationship with a Murano glass manufacturer, Seguso, and worked with glassblowers in applying an ancient antiquing technique, called scavo, to create a series of distinctive chandeliers, candlesticks, and sconces with a modern sensibility.

As the Karl Springer business expanded and became more complicated, Springer’s brother Joachim joined in and took over the idiosyncratic bookkeeping (some of it not entirely by the book; employees remember seeing shopping bags of cash). It was a heady time, and Springer himself was flush with disco fever, clubbing at Studio 54 and diving into the notorious Fire Island parties of 1982 and 1983. By the mid-1980s the Karl Springer dynasty was ending. Shortly before his death in 1991, Karl’s health began to rapidly decline, and he was no longer able to pay the close attention to detailing and quality control that had always characterized his process. He sold the company, and subsequently, Karl Springer Ltd. filed for Chapter 11 in 1993.

In the late eighties, tastes were also changing. Ronald Reagan conservatism and Ralph Lauren traditionalism were in vogue, and American reproductions were outselling creative spirits like Springer, Tommi Parzinger, and Paul Evans.

These designers, who all stumbled into highly successful businesses, at least for a time, may have sought glory and fame but never brand domination: keeping the artistry alive was their higher goal. And as the disco decades became an aesthetic punch line, with John Travolta’s black and white rayon suit as benchmark, a sense of the achievements of these exclusive artistdesigners was lost. Further complicating matters in Springer’s case, questions have lingered over how the sale of his company and existing inventory were handled in the nineties. For collectors, it is not easy to discern true Springer originals from the authorized and gypsy reproductions, the fakes and the copies that all abound. Until recently, resale of Springer pieces did not even keep up with the original high prices. That is changing, and in 2006, at the Sotheby’s sale of furniture from the Tony Ingrao collection, a rare Springer

table from 1979 with a steel base and a top with feathers under glass sold for $66,000.

Collectors are again taking stock of Springer’s work, recognizing that the early pieces have the allure of the twentieth-century masters Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Jean-Michel Frank. Exquisitely made for a short period of time by traditionally trained artisans, Springer’s furnishings captured the look and vitality of a unique moment in modernity that flourished, then blazed out like a supernova star.

Excerpt from: Modern Americana: Studio Furniture From High Craft to High Glam (Rizzoli 2008 / 2018)

TODD MERRILL STUDIO Todd Merrill Studio represents an international group of established and emerging artists, each with a singular artistic vision and unprecedented point of view. In creating unique works of collectible design, each artist takes a hands-on approach that intersects contemporary design, fine art, traditional craft techniques, and pioneering innovation.

Individually, through meticulous craftsmanship and rigorous studio experimentation, each has developed leading-edge, proprietary methods that break previously set inherent limitations of conventional materials like wood, metal, plaster, concrete, ceramics, glass, and resin. Their intimate studio approach fosters an atmosphere of creativity where the work rendered significantly bears the hand of the artist.

Collectively the artists are helping to create a new visual vocabulary that advances long-held, established artistic boundaries. Their dynamic, one-of-a-kind, and frequently groundbreaking works contribute to today’s increasingly relevant grey space between art and design.

With the gallery’s support, the artists’ works have entered the collections of major private and public patrons and prestigious museums including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Museum of Art and Design in New York; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Carnegie Museum of Art in Philadelphia, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

In 2000, Todd Merrill opened Todd Merrill Antiques which quickly became renowned for its glamorous and eclectic mix of twentiethcentury furniture and lighting. The pioneering gallery was one of the of the first to promote modernist and postmodernist American studio artisans including Paul Evans, Phillip Lloyd Powell, George Nakashima, Karl Springer, James Mont, Tommi Parzinger, among others.

In 2008, Rizzoli published Merrill’s “Modern Americana: Studio Furniture from High Craft to High Glam”, the first ever authoritative examination of the great studio furniture makers and designers who, from 1940 thru the 1990s defined American high style. To celebrate the tenth anniversary, in 2018 Rizzoli published an expanded edition, adding 60 pages to his original book. This survey of the period continues with two massive additional chapters focused on Women Makers and Showrooms.

After the publication of Modern Americana in 2008, Merrill began to shift the focus of the gallery and started the Studio Contemporary program which has today become his primary focus. Also in 2008 the gallery introduced Custom Originals, a line of custom produced upholstered furniture designed by Merrill himself. Merrill’s signature creations reflect his vast experience with twentieth-century design and knowledge of contemporary tastes.