Skip Navigation

Vanity with Mirror

Decorative Arts and Design

Aerodynamic streamlining is characteristic of much American industrial and domestic design of the late 1920s and 1930s. Undecorated, curved designs, as seen here, are well suited to machine production and expressive of speed and change. The vanity and stool are made of chromed metal tubing, an innovation in furniture construction pioneered in the early 1920s by Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus, the seminal German school for modern design. It was still a startling new material a decade later.

Although the vanity is gender-specific, this stark, modern interpretation has a limited palette and is made of new materials with hard surfaces. Updating an old form, Kem Weber transformed it for the modern woman.
MEDIUM Chrome-plated tubular steel, wood, glass
DATES 1934
DIMENSIONS 55 x 33 x 19 1/2 in. (139.7 x 83.8 x 49.5 cm)  (show scale)
MARKINGS no marks
SIGNATURE no signature
INSCRIPTIONS no inscriptions
ACCESSION NUMBER 87.123.1a-b
CREDIT LINE Modernism Benefit Fund
CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION Vanity table (a) with attached mirror (b), en suite with stool (87.123.2). Vanity composed of tubular steel structure forming base, legs and braces that support black-painted wood tabletop with drawer. Rising from rear of wood top, asymmetrically supported by three flat, vertical, chrome-plated pieces and semi-circular tubular steel piece is a circular mirror. CONDITION: Splits in veneer on tabletop.
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
CAPTION Kem Weber (American, born Germany, 1889–1963). Vanity with Mirror, 1934. Chrome-plated tubular steel, wood, glass, 55 x 33 x 19 1/2 in. (139.7 x 83.8 x 49.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Modernism Benefit Fund, 87.123.1a-b. Creative Commons-BY (Photo: , 87.123.1a-b_87.123.2_bw.jpg)
IMAGE group, 87.123.1a-b_87.123.2_bw.jpg.
"CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don\'t yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.
RIGHTS STATEMENT Creative Commons-BY
You may download and use Brooklyn Museum images of this three-dimensional work in accordance with a Creative Commons license. Fair use, as understood under the United States Copyright Act, may also apply. Please include caption information from this page and credit the Brooklyn Museum. If you need a high resolution file, please fill out our online application form (charges apply). For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org.
RECORD COMPLETENESS
Not every record you will find here is complete. More information is available for some works than for others, and some entries have been updated more recently. Records are frequently reviewed and revised, and we welcome any additional information you might have.