Thayer Coggin Milo Baughman Prisma Rocking Chair

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Seller’s Notes: Milo Baughman for Thayer Coggin 1984 Prisma collection armchair rocker lounge. After decades of working with Thayer Coggin, a famously ‘hands-on’ boss that maintained final say over each and every design that went into production, Baughman was well aware of the fact that marketability and a certain level of pandering to Coggin’s established client base around the US was key to his designs bring out into production by his long-time collaborator and boss.
However, inspired by the courageous young avant-garde designers known as the Memphis Group that burst on to the works stage in 1981 with a total disregard for the traditions and design tenants of restrained, idealized Modernism, Baughman designed a small collection of 11 colorful, post-modern pieces Abe convinced Coggin to put the collection into production by 1984. The unexpected designs made a splash upon their debut, with critics praising Baughman’s graceful and carefully considered take on the wild Italian ‘new design.’ The wider American audience and Coggin’s well-to-do yet conservative clientele did not take to Baughman’s experiment in exercising complete creative control. ”Only galleries bought it,” Baughman told the NYT in the months after the collection’s release. Prisma bombed as far as Coggin’s was concerned and Baughman was told to discard his next Avant Garden collection in favor of a return to what sells. Baughman moved to a ranch in Utah and began teaching at BYU and would not work with Coggin for the next few years. Things never entirely recovered between the two and Baughman’s notion of what his design career was about never entirely recovered.
Pieces from the 1984 Prisma collection are extremely difficult to come by, especially the major statement piece of the collection, the glorious rocker lounge chair available here. This chair retains its original fabric and is in overall good vintage condition.
Literature:
Oscar Fitzgerald, American furniture: 1650 to the Present , 2017.
P 517; CH 19 Postmodern and Avant Garde Furniture since 1975
Carol Vogel, Home design; high point’s new verve
New York Times, April 29, 1984
Dylan Landis, sowing the seeds of good design
Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1987.

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