The Mackmurdo chair, one of only five known in the world
designed by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, was jointly purchased
by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Huntington
Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in order to help
ease the financial burden of purchasing the pricey piece.
Photo copyrighted property of The Huntington Library,
Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, © The Huntington.

When two intricately carved mahogany chairs were discovered
at a country auction, Wendy Kaplan knew she wanted one.

The chair Kaplan coveted was the iconic Mackmurdo chair, created
by English designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo around 1882.

As the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's head and curator of
decorative art, Kaplan had known about the chair for years and even included a
picture of it in her first book, The Art
That Is Life: The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920.

Considered one of the first manifestations of art nouveau,
the chair also reflects the Arts and Crafts movement, an anti-industrial
backlash that has its origins in England with Mackmurdo's famous contemporaries,
William Morris and John Ruskin.

Before the Mackmurdo chairs were discovered at the auction,
only three examples of the seat were known and already established in museums.  Two were at London's William Morris
Gallery and one was at the Victoria and Albert Museum, also in London. 

The two new finds brought tally of Mackmurdo chairs up to
five.  The Virginia Museum of Fine
Arts in Richmond, VA, bought the fourth Mackmurdo chair, and Kaplan had her eye
on the fifth and final Mackmurdo masterpiece.

The price was $325,000.

To raise funds for the chair, Kaplan chose to present it at
LACMA's annual Collectors Committee weekend, a competitive showcase where LACMA
curators pitch an item they want the museum to buy, and donors vote on which object
to fund.

During the committee meeting, which the New York Times covered, Kaplan explained the importance of the
chair.  The piece was an incredibly
early example of art nouveau and would be an important addition to LACMA.  The museum houses a first-rate arts and crafts collection but nothing from Mackmurdo's workshop, the Century Guild. 

''It's nerve-racking,'' Kaplan told the New York Times. ''You tell yourself it's only an object, not your
health. But you've researched it intensively, and you're crushed if you don't
get it.''

The chair was a hard sell.  Actor Kyle MacLachlan, who attended the committee weekend,
told the Times, "I was thinking about
the museum context and what would get people to the museum...I don't go to a
museum to see a chair."

And Kaplan's colleagues brought tough competition.  Ten departments presented objects for
the donors to consider, from Japanese tea sets to Chilean antiwar paintings, and
explained why the museum had to purchase them.

Unfortunately for Kaplan, limited funds meant that LACMA
could only afford two of the ten presented objects. 

The donors did not select the chair.

Not ready to give up, Kaplan continued searching for the
necessary resources.  At first, she
looked to LACMA patrons for funding. 
A contributor at the event promised $25,000, but it wasn't enough.

"I couldn't bear just giving it up yet," Kaplan said in a
phone interview.  "It would be an
unbearable lacuna to not have anything by Century Guild (in our collection)."

Next, the curator turned her gaze across town, to San
Marino's Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, which
houses a fine collection of arts and crafts pieces.  The Mackmurdo chair would fit into the Huntington's exhibit
as well as LACMA's.

The two institutions came to an agreement.  They would purchase the chair jointly
and both museums would raise half the $325,000 price tag.  The move would bring the chair to Los
Angeles and make it a part--albeit a temporary part--of each institution's galleries.

"It really did fit into the two collections of LACMA and
Huntington so well.  Rather than
competing with our sister institution, why didn't we collaborate?" said
Catherine Hess, chief curator of European art at the Huntington, where the Mackmurdo
chair was installed on December 10.

The institutions plan to trade the chair every two
years.  When it arrives at LACMA,
it will sit in a newly restored gallery that focuses on the international Arts
and Crafts movement.  Because LACMA
has such a large collection of art nouveau objects and can't display everything,
it will lend a piece to the Huntington when the chair moves across town.

Now, the chair sits gloriously in its impermanent new home:
the Huntington's Mansion. 

The Mansion, which re-opened in 2008 after a $20 million
renovation, was originally Henry and Arabella Huntington's private residence.  The bottom floor contains a portrait gallery
and several rooms designed to reflect the tastes of the original owners.  The top floor once held six bedroom
suites and now houses galleries of European art.

The chair is in the last gallery on the Mansion's top floor.  Hess described the chair as "a perfect
complement to the other material we have."  And it does fit with the other pieces, looking incredibly
mature compared to objects designed ten and twenty years later.

It sits on a raised platform next to a 1903 "Ladder-Back
Side Chair" by Charles Rennie Macintosh.  The clean lines of Macintosh's ladder chair and the vigorous natural
shapes of Mackmurdo's design reflect two different styles of the art nouveau
movement, which "embraced both sweeping organic forms and controlled geometric
ones," according to the National Art Gallery's web site on art nouveau.  

From the ceiling hangs W.A.S. Benson's 1900 "Three-Light Electrolier,"
an electric chandelier, complete with bulbs that look like inverted tulips and
ornaments resembling dead leaves. 
The floral designs reflect the organic structures of the Mackmurdo chair.

Across the hallway and down the stairs is a piece from the
workshop of Mackmurdo's contemporary and mentor, William Morris.  The piece is an enormous 1898
stain-glass work, called "Humility, Mercy, Generosity, Charity, Justice,
Liberty, Truth, Love, Faith, Courage," and it peeks around the corner at the
chair.

It's easy to see why Mackmurdo's chair drew attention when
it was unveiled at Liverpool's "Invention Exhibition" in 1885.  Mackmurdo's goal was to show that his
work wasn't simply carpentry but art, and his Century Guild stated that its
purpose was to "restore building, decoration, glass-painting, pottery,
wood-carving and metal to their rightful places beside painting and
sculpture."  In something as
ordinary as a chair, there is an incredible amount of artistry.

 "Mackmurdo was
an interesting character," said Hess. 
"He was quite interested in the way nature responded to the
elements.  He was interested in how
plants above ground responded to wind and how plants below ground responded to
water."

The back of the chair does resemble some variety of aquatic
plant--Hess noted that one of the Huntington's botanists identified the swirling
leaves as a kind of kelp.  From a
simple, thick "root" at the base flow about a dozen vines, half of which curve
in a backward 'S' towards five flowers at the top.

These plant-like tracings are what Kaplan describes as a
"response to the industrialization of the nineteenth century" and a common
design for the Century Guild. 

Kaplan noted that "in the early years of the Century Guild,
this chair was not unique for them. 
You have textiles and other pieces of furniture which are also in these
stem-forms, floral forms and seaweed."  Mackmurdo used an almost identical sketch for the
frontispiece of a book called Wren's City
Churches.

Although they're carved in hard mahogany, there is a sense
of movement to the tendrils, as if they were rendered with an expressive paintbrush.  The chair's simple Queen Anne seat and
legs are surprisingly plain, contrasting with the intricate back piece.

Although the chair is currently colored in somber shades of
brown and black, restoration experts speculate it was once painted in ochre, red,
yellow, and green.  These bright
colors probably lent a sense of depth to the vines as they crisscrossed across
the back of the chair. 

Hess said that perhaps a previous owner felt that the
chair's vivid polychrome colors were too wild and varnished over them.

"I think they all were painted over," said Kaplan of the
other four Mackmurdo chairs, which are all colored in blacks and browns.  "But we're the only ones who think it
would be an amazing idea to restore the original glory of these greens and
reds."

Even if the museums opt to maintain the chair's more subtle
shading, the piece has what Hess called a "magic combination" of being both
beautiful and historically important. 
"I think (museum visitors) will find it very engaging, it has an
aesthetic appeal that will cut across a wide swath of the public," she said.

Kaplan thinks that viewers will react the same way they did
at the Collectors Committee. 
"People love that chair.  I think the first words were wow and
then double wow," she said.  
"It's an easy chair to love if you don't know anything about it and it
just gets more interesting the more you do know."

Just as the chair anticipated the art nouveau movement, its
place as a shared object in two museums may be at the forefront of a trend in art
acquisitions.

It has become increasingly difficult to find spaces in
museums.  Kaplan pointed out that
LACMA simply doesn't have the room to display all the artwork it owns.  And as cash-strapped galleries and tight-fisted
donors find ways to bring artwork into Los Angeles during tough economic times,
sharing pieces like the Mackmurdo chair may become more common.

"Masterpieces don't come along very often and they're very
expensive," said Kaplan.  "I think
it will lead to other collaborations. 
There is no downside to this." 

Other museums have shared artwork in the past.  In the early 1980s, the Getty Museum
and Pasadena's Norton Simon co-purchased Nicholas Poussin's "The Holy Family
with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Saint Elizabeth" and Degas' "Waiting."
 In 2004, the British Museum and the
Victoria and Albert Museum collaboratively purchased a $1.5 million statue of
Buddha.

Some museums are looking past international borders for
partnerships in acquisitions.  The
first example of this brand of collaboration occurred in 2002 when the Tate
Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Pompidou in Paris
purchased Bill Viola's "Five Angels for the Millennium."  This year, the National Gallery of
Scotland and the National Gallery in London co-purchased Titian's "Diana and
Actaeon" and plan to trade the painting every five years.

 "This is
happening a lot," Neal Benezra, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, told Art Newspaper in the 2004 article,
"The Days of Single Ownership are Over." 
He added, "It's been unusual for museums to share, but it's becoming
more common as we all try to deal with a challenging economic climate and the
availability of works of art, which tend to be few and expensive."

If anything, these shared purchases have increased the buzz
around the artwork and give the galleries more opportunities to promote their
purchases.  They also allow
curators to collaborate instead of compete, pooling resources, donors, and only
footing half the bill.

But the Tate Museum's educational web site on joint
acquisitions notes that there are some drawbacks.  When museums in the same area begin co-purchasing art pieces,
they might unintentionally create an unappealing "sameness" in their
collections.

And when distant museums share ownership, especially across
international borders, there can be confusion about which institution is
responsible for the piece, how insurance should be purchased, and the safest
way to regularly move the artifact across long distances.

In the case of LACMA and the Huntington's co-purchase of the
Mackmurdo chair, it has allowed both institutions to add a masterpiece to their
collections without breaking the piggy bank.  And it's not an opportunity they will have again.

Although more Mackmurdo chairs may surface at another
country auction one day (Kaplan speculated that Mackmurdo may have designed a
dining room set of six or eight), Los Angeles is home to the last known
chair.  And Kaplan said she won't
chase another chair if it appears on the market.  "One is enough," she said.