The Italian word for armchair is poltrona. A word that already contains the word ‘throne’, as well as the enlargement that characterizes such a piece of furniture. Sitting wide, man or woman spreading in chair shape.
This autumn there will be a striking number of these enlarged chairs on display at exhibitions in the Netherlands. Museum Paleis Het Loo is devoting an exhibition to it, Power of the Throne, with all conceivable variants. This shows, among other things, spoiler alertthat the Oranges do not have a real throne. A chair is often specially decorated for the occasion.
Chair takes position is the name of the exhibition in the Centraal Museum Utrecht, where fine specimens can also be seen. The pinnacle is the iconic one Poltrona di Proust from 1978 by Alessandro Mendini. The exhibition features a cast bronze version, sighing with obesity over pathetic crooked legs. Not for sitting on. Well worth watching with fascination. In all its bronze importance there is something animalic about it, this sophisticated version of the simple piece of seating furniture. Not something, but someone is such a chair. In a sense, this applies to all chairs, the simplest and the most lavish.
The throne chair of all throne chairs was made by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Ai has used the power of the chair in a thousand ways. Six thousand three-legged stools stood in Berlin’s Martin Gropiusbau in 2014, as the bearer of so many Chinese lives kept small. Fairy Tale – 1001 Chairs is an installation of twenty-three classical Chinese chairs from the collection of Museum Voorlinden.
Ai Weiwei’s oeuvre also includes a poltrona, from 2011. Title: Marble Sofa. The book Ai Weiwei, in Search of humanity says that this is a sofa that could be found in millions of Chinese living rooms in the 1970s, as a sign of prosperity.
Ai has not made his poltrona from leather but from marble, from an area in China where the whitest, most expensive marble has been mined for more than a thousand years. The same material was used for the seating furniture on which the marble Chairman Mao sits behind the entrance to his mausoleum in Beijing.