Chair 1937

Samuel Fineman made this drawing of a chair with watercolor and graphite on paper sometime in the 20th century. It shows a chair with an upholstered seat and a decorative back, rendered with careful attention to proportion and detail. We can see that this drawing was likely produced within an institutional context, maybe for an industrial design school. Fineman was probably not making art for art's sake. He was acquiring technical and professional skills, learning to translate three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional representations, in order to become a designer. To fully understand the place of such a drawing, we need to know more about the specific design school in which it was made, who was teaching there, and what kind of social and economic network supported it. By looking into these questions, the art historian is able to appreciate how it gives visual form to these important social structures.