Wagenfeld table lamp WA 24

"It is not from the chair but from sitting, not from the glass but from drinking, not from the jug but from holding and pouring. Not from the lamp, but from the light and glow." Wilhelm Wagenfeld, whose work was honored with an exhibition in Bremen in 2010 on the occasion of his 110th birthday, was the "industrial designer" of his time par excellence and, alongside Peter Behrens, the founding father of a profession in Germany that is represented in almost every major manufacturing company today. However, he himself struggled with the term, even rejecting it. For him, "design" meant that the designed object threatened to be original, possibly even expressing the individuality of a designer's personality, and nothing was further from his mind than that. In 1924, in the Bauhaus metal workshop under the direction of Moholy-Nagy, he created one of his most famous designs, the Bauhaus table lamp. Like his time at the Bauhaus, it was formative for his thinking, even if he would later attest to the lamp's questionable proximity to handicrafts - not in terms of technology and design, which he considered successful throughout his life, but because of the Bauhaus's distance from industry: the lamp was not a mass product and could never become one.