Celebrated designer Vladimir Kagan could bring sensuality to the sofa

Published 12:00 am Thursday, April 14, 2016

In the hotelier André Balazs’s office in Lower Manhattan, in front of his industrial-looking Charlotte Perriand desk, sits a Vladimir Kagan chair. Upholstered in green leather, it has been used for all the usual purposes, from making phone calls to firing off emails.

Yet Balazs does not talk about it as if it were any chair. He refers to its “sensuously curved legs” and how sitting in it is like “being enveloped by a nymph.”

“Try not to make me sound dirty,” he said. “But I think that with good furniture, if it doesn’t at some point make you want to make love on it, it’s missing something.”

He is not alone in that response. Whenever people talk about the work of Kagan, one of the 20th century’s most successful designers, who died on Thursday at 88, they almost invariably come around to the idea of sensuality. His daughter Vanessa Diserio said Kagan died of a heart attack in Palm Beach, Florida.

Everything about his swivels and swoops and exaggerated detailing is an invitation to experience his furniture tactility and enjoy it fully. “A seductive curve” was how Margaret Russell, the editor in chief of Architectural Digest, described Kagan’s design signature in an interview.

His reclining lounge chairs owe a clear debt to Scandinavian designers like Finn Juhl and Hans Wegner. Kagan’s twist was to fuse their aesthetic with the biomorphic shapes of Isamu Noguchi, stretching the wood legs out in back almost like chewing gum, giving them a kooky Edward Scissorhands vibe.

His serpentine sofa, perhaps the best known of all Kagan’s creations, is an armless, curvilinear swoosh of a thing (often upholstered in velvet) — what might be found if the Jetsons decided to relocate from Orbit City to the Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills.

“I think he was wonderfully sexual,” the designer Tom Ford, a major client of Kagan’s, said in an interview. “He gave off that kind of energy even in his later years.”

Wendy Goodman, the design editor of New York magazine, said Kagan “understood that modernism does not have to be austere.”

He was even selected to create furniture for the Monsanto House of the Future at Disneyland, a giant block of white fiberglass, which from 1957 to 1967 offered visitors a peek at what life might look like someday, complete with microwave ovens and floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind that have become a mainstay of contemporary architecture.

Kagan was not precious about the work he took on. His father was a sculptor and cabinetmaker whose motto was “measure everything three times and cut once”; Kagan liked to joke that he measured nothing and cut things over and over again. Rather than being tortured by the creative process, Kagan reveled in it, refusing over the course of many up, down, near-death experiences and tragic losses to be sidelined by almost anything.

Kagan was born Aug. 29, 1927, in Worms, a small city in the Rhineland region of Germany, and grew up in a Jewish family during the rise of Nazism. An early photograph has him in a coat with a Nazi-mandated Star of David on it.

In 1937, his mother, Hildegard, emigrated with him and his sister to France, then took them by steam liner to New York, where his father, Illi, had already relocated.

After high school, the younger Kagan took classes in architecture at Columbia University and, without graduating, went to work at his father’s cabinetry shop on 57th Street. He eventually struck out on his own, designing glamorously exaggerated furniture and selling pieces to stars like Marilyn Monroe, Lily Pons and Gary Cooper.

The Park Avenue apartment where Kagan lived with his wife, Erica Wilson — a needlepoint queen whose public-television show presaged the Martha Stewart era of do-it-yourself home improvement — was a wild, quirky monument to his career, complete with seemingly every major piece of furniture he ever put his stamp on.

The bedroom was papered in celery green, the foyer in bright red and blue. In the living room, a giant kaleidoscopic Frank Stella print was propped up against a forest-green wall near a wire-mesh and cast-iron bird cage that for much of the 1970s was home to more than two dozen canaries and finches.

The cardinal household rule, Diserio said, was “do not jump on the furniture.”

Besides her, he is survived by another daughter, Jessica Kagan Cushman, a jewelry designer, and a brother, Illya Kagan, an artist. Wilson died in 2011.

Kagan’s profile had receded by the 1980s. His signature had gone out of vogue and a fire destroyed his workshop.

But he made a tremendous comeback over the last two decades. Ford, who was Gucci’s design director from 1994 to 2004, selected Kagan’s omnibus sofa to go in all Gucci stores, and Balazs began installing Kagan furniture at his Standard Hotel empire.

Kagan’s re-emergence was barely slowed when he developed spinal stenosis, requiring him to walk with two canes. In 2006 he published a coffee-table book, “Vladimir Kagan: A Lifetime of Avant Garde Design,” with a preface by Ford and a foreword in the updated edition released last year by the architect Zaha Hadid, who died March 31. He kept a blog on his website. He lectured at colleges, accepted honorary degrees, and went to see virtually every major exhibit at the Metropolitan and Whitney museums of art and the Museum of Modern Art.

“He was the man who couldn’t say no,” Russell said.

Indeed, on the day he died, Kagan was in Florida to attend a cocktail reception in Palm Beach that his dealer, Ralph Pucci, was hosting to celebrate Kagan’s latest chair, the Gabriella. At the time, Kagan was also finishing up another cloud-shaped sofa that he was calling, with characteristic self-confidence, his masterpiece.