An early Bauhaus glass and metal table lamp designed by C. Jucker circa 1923

circa 1928 - 1930 The private collection of a former care-taker of the Bauhaus building in Weimar and later Dessau (further consisting of works by a.o. Schlemmer, Breuer and Kandinsky), thence by descent

1991 a private German collection

1999 Quittenbaum Munchen, 80 Jahre Bauhaus Design, 10 May 1999, lot 262

Acquired by a German private collector

The Bauhaus Lamp by Carl Jucker

The Bauhaus lamp, an icon of 20th century design, is commonly associated with Bauhaus designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld. However, as recent studies have pointed out, the credits for the invention of it’s most striking feature, the glass base with a glass shaft, should go to Wagenfeld’s fellow student Carl J. Jucker (1902- 1997).
The origins of the lamp can be traced back to 1923, when Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was appointed head of the metal workshop. The first assignment he gave to his students was to design lamps for the newly built Haus am Horn, which would be presented at the Bauhaus school-exhibition in the summer of 1923. Jucker, Wagenfeld and the Hungarian student Gyula Pap started experimenting with lamp armatures composed of glass and metal segments. Six prototypes by Jucker are known from photographs (later dated 1923), which show lamps with glass bases and shafts with painted lightbulbs or various shades. One of these prototypes is depicted in Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstaetten (published 1925), described as a design by Jucker and dated 1923. Another version, closer to the final model with glass base, shaft and milk-glass shade, is depicted in the same catalogue as a design by both Jucker and Wagenfeld from 1923/1924.
In april 1924 Wagenfeld executed a variation on this model, with a nickelplated metal base and shaft. A productlist from the Bauhaus workshop (dated 1925) identifies this metal version as Tischlampe MT8 by Wagenfeld, and the one with glass base and shaft as Tischlampe aus Glas MT9 by Jucker. By that time, already eighty MT8 and forty-five MT9 lamps had been manually produced at the metal workshop. It would take another four years before the lamp was finally taken into machine-made series production.
Jucker left the Bauhaus already in September 1923, not long after the exhibition in which one of his prototype table lamps first featured. It was Wilhelm Wagenfeld who consequently perfected this model, adjusting the proportions of base and shade, to its final, at the present day world-famous, shape.