Interview

BRANT: Can you describe that show to me? I’ve never seen photographs of it. I only know some of the more historic pieces.

NEWSON: Well, there were six pieces in the exhibition. The Lockheed Lounge was one, but there were five other bits of furniture that have not become particularly well known. They were all chairs. The chair was, you know, my thing. There was another chair there called the Music Chair that ended up morphing intothe Embryo Chair. The Embryo Chair came about around 18 months later. It was far more fluid. There was also another piece in the exhibition, apart from that version of the Lockheed Lounge, which is actually different than the one that you have. It’s got a slightly different design on the back. I only made one of those, and it was bought by a museum. In fact, it was the only piece from the exhibition that sold.

BRANT: The Lockheed Lounge has always had such a great feeling. You can tell from the way it’s fastened that there’s the idea of aircraft and aerospace. But it also has so many classical features and recalls David’s portrait of MadameRécamier—those paintings of her posing on a chaise lounge. How did it actually come about?

NEWSON: Obviously, it’s kind of a moniker which became it’s name. Lockheed Lounge was never what it was originally called. I never had a name for it in the beginning, but it’s far more classical than any of the other work I’ve ever done. It is really anachronistic in some ways—it’s a combination of something that’s very classical and also sort of new. We still had to study art history in school. It was the time of postmodernism, where anything that was classical was something that was very, very prevalent. I was hugely inspired in those days by Charles Jencks—even Robert Gray and Philip Johnson, you know, all those people getting huge amounts of attention. The classical flavor comes from being influenced by that type of postmodernism. And then the reason it looks sort of airplane-like was because I wanted to build that form more into a fluid aluminum shape, but, quite frankly, I didn’t have the technical expertise to do it in a single piece of metal. I just didn’t know how to make it like that. Itended up being all of these little pieces, and I rooted it together. I mean, it really ended up looking like it did very much for practical reasons. And, of course, it ended up looking like an old BT3 [ww11 military trailer] or something. That’s sort of where the name Lockheed came from.

BRANT: I have a sense from looking at all of your work that you have a penchant for the female form. The Pod chest of drawers that you madeafter Lockheed always reminded me of the Groult art deco cabinet that’s in the form of the female body. Were you aware of that at the time?

NEWSON: Absolutely. The Lockheed Lounge and the Pod chest of drawers are very classical in their references. I used the Groult pieces as a direct reference. In fact, I wasn’t trying to hide it when I made it—I wanted that to be very, very obvious. I wanted it to be kind of a modern version of that piece. Same with the Lockheed Lounge—it was directly related to the painting of Madame Récamier. It was supposed to be the lounge she was lying on.

BRANT: One of my favorite paintings . . . [laughs]

NEWSON: Bizarrely, me too. I love that picture. In art school, it was one of the things that I learned about and thought, “Wow. How can I take that and create something modern with it?” So those references were intentionally obvious.

BRANT: The metal for the Pod is applied almost like sharkskin. And with those underlying classical references, it ultimately becomes this perfect form.

NEWSON: What’s interesting is that for a very large exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, they used my Pod chest and Groult’s cabinet for the publicity. At a bus stop, you’d see a poster with one half mine and one half his. I’m glad people have come to understand that, in a way, I’m tipping my hat to those pieces from the past.

BRANT: You started going to Tokyo in the late ’80s, and you eventually moved there in the early ’90s. I know you travel a lot. You’re always on a plane. Has travel influenced your design?

NEWSON: I think it must have influenced my design. When you’re from Australia, you’re obliged to travel in some ways—you can’treally not travel if you want to get anywhere in Australia. It dawned on me very quickly thatdesign is such an international business. I don’t mean international in a grand sense. In fact,design is rather immature. It hasn’t existed anywhere near as long as art or sculpture or the music industry or any of the other creative arts. So you’re obliged to travel. I couldn’t just set up a business and work because there isn’t enough work in one country to sustain what I do. I have to work in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan . . . One of the great things about design is that it’s truly international. No one in the design industry would say, “This country is mine,” or “I will make it look this way because it’s for an American market and that way for a Chinese market.” If you look at all of the Apple products, they are the sameeverywhere . . . I mean, I can’t deny that I love traveling. It’s a very healthy thing to be able to appreciate other cultures—or at least witness them firsthand. And all of that goes into helping someone be a good designer, because it’s an international business.