NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s announces Marc Newson’s iconic Lockheed Lounge will highlight the Masterworks of Design sale on December 17 in New York. This curated sale of approximately 30 lots will represent the best of the best in 20th Century design, ranging in style from Art Nouveau to contemporary design. The Lockheed Lounge, created in 1990, is numbered four from the edition of ten, and was named in homage to the Machine-Age aesthetic of the American aircraft manufacturer. With its subtly antique chaise-lounge form yet strikingly futuristic, streamlined design, Newson inaugurated a new aesthetic language for the 21st century and received international cultural and academic acclaim as a creator whose vision, sensitivity and relevance is unparalleled.

LOCKHEED LOUNGE HISTORY
In June 1986, after graduating from Sydney College of the Arts with a degree in in sculpture, jewelry and furniture design, Australian-born Marc Newson accepted the opportunity to exhibit new furniture designs at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. Newson exhibited his prototype, which proved a unique stylistic breakthrough from the high-tech constructivism that characterized mainstream 1980s design. Newson strove to further assure the design’s modernity and to invoke a sensation of shimmering transience by cladding the entire surface with a seamless cloak of polished aluminum. Proving technically impossible, Newson reverted to his training as a jeweler to meticulously cut, hammer and then assemble a mosaic of thin aluminum panels that were blind-riveted to the hand-sculpted fiberglass understructure.

The present example, numbered ‘4’, was only the fourth of the Lockheeds to have been produced, being the third to have been crafted by Basecraft – the first example having been hand-built by Newson. This example, number ‘4’, can be anchored to the specific moment – 1990 – when Newson’s appeal began, swiftly, to engage with an international stage. An early supporter, Teruo Kurosaki, owner of the IDEE store in Tokyo, arranged for Newson – by now himself resident in Tokyo – to exhibit a collection of recent furniture designs, including this Lockheed, in his store in an exhibition entitled ‘Fresh Produce by Marc Newson’, 1990. The assembled works were imaginatively displayed – floating, suspended in air, as if the trophies of an imaginary fisherman’s haul. Upon the close of the exhibition Lockheed number ‘4’ was positioned in the window of IDEE, from where it was purchased by the present owner.

ACCLAIM AND POPULAR CULTURE
• An early and enthusiastic supporter was Philippe Starck, who in 1990 acquired an example for use in the lobby of Ian Schrager’s Paramount Hotel, New York.

• During the same period in 1990, an example of the Lockheed, and of the accompanying Pod cabinet, was exhibited at London’s Liberty & Co. department store.

• In 1993 the Lockheed was brought to a wider audience when featured as the centerpiece in Madonna’s video for her single, ‘Rain’.

• In 1995 the Vitra Design Museum included the Lockheed in their highly influential traveling exhibition of ‘100 Masterpieces’.

• In 2000 the chaise was the focus of the Carnegie Art Museum’s aluminum retrospective, occupying both front and back covers of the exhibition catalogue.