J. & J. Kohn

Jacob and Josef Kohn and their descendents influenced classic furniture design from the jugendstil and wiener werstatte styles. The Kohn family firm was founded in 1850, as a producer of lumber. Jacob Kohn went into partnership with his son Josef (1814-1884) in 1867. J&J Kohn is most famous for their chairs including rocking chairs. Their factory in wsetin, moravia (vsetin, czechoslovakia) was built toward the end of 1869. J&J Kohn were associated with renowned architects and designers from the turn of the century onward. J&J Kohn supervised the production of furniture by such leading figures as Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Kolornan Moser, and Hans (brother of Otto) Prutscher. The production of chairs which conformed to the contour of the back demanded a curved back. This proved exceptionally difficult in many moods such as Brentwood. In 1856 Michael Thonet solved this problem: after a lengthy period of watering and steaming began the bending of solid wood with the help of Sheet Iron Strips in Casting Moulds. This wood, which was cut as it had naturally grown, and in the direction of the grain was, in solid pieces, bent as the form or shape demanded. In 1842 Michael Thonet was granted the Patent "Holz in beliebige Formen und Schweifungen zu biegen" (Wood bending, in any Shape and Form) by the K.K. allgemeinen Hofkammer in Vienna. In 1853 the Patent was renewed and remained upright until 1869. Once the Patent expired the Bentwood industry rapidly developed, so much so, that by 1893, 51 companies (25 in Austria-Hungary), including J&J Kohn, were in production. And by 1869, J&J Kohn immediately became Thonet's most serious rival. While Thonet required one to two hours to make their wooden rods flexible using steam, their rival Kohn had installed a machine which could produce these parts within 3 - 5 minutes. This allowed, the 4 factories belonging to the Kohn brothers to produce 5,500 pieces of furniture daily. In the 1870s and 1880s, the firm imitated and varied successful Thonet models, often adopting the Thonet model numbers for identical chairs of their own production. In 1899, the firm appointed Gustav Siegel, a pupil of Josef Hoffmann at the wiener kunstgewerbeschule (Vienna School of Applied Arts), as head of the firm's design department. Siegel was probably responsible for a majority of the furniture designs produced between 1899 and 1914. In 1907 the J&J Kohn factories employed about 6,000 workers. The firm was awarded a Grand Prix at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. The firm participated in the 1901 Winter Exhibition at the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna, the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts in Turin in 1902, and the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in Saint Louis in 1904. Kohn also showed at exhibitions in Milan, London, and Bucharest in 1906, at the Kunstschau in Vienna in 1908, and in Buenos Aires and Munich in 1910.

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