EAST WINDSOR, CONN. — Guaranteed to make you smile, Pedro Friedeberg’s (b 1936) carved hand chairs have sold more than 5,000 copies since the first was created in 1962. One of these totems of Surrealist counterculture sold for $14,760, including buyer’s premium, at Golden Gavel’s August 8, Summer Antique Southwest Midcentury Auction. Signed on the base, the chair was 34 inches tall, 17½ inches wide and 20 inches deep. The whimsical seating is designed to allow one to sit on the palm, using the fingers as a back and arm rest. The story of its creation is recounted in an article in Architectural Digest by design editor, Hannah Martin. “When artist Pedro Friedeberg’s mentor — the painter and sculptor Mathias Goeritz — left Mexico City for a vacation in 1962, he asked the young Surrealist a favor: Give a favorite local carpenter some work,” Martin writes.

“I told him to make a hand,” Friedeberg remembers. “Then I said, ‘Why don’t you make it big enough to sit on. I thought that would be funny.” When Goeritz returned, he and Manhattan dealer Georges Keller asked to see what Friedeberg had been up to. Georges told me, “These are wonderful! I want two for New York, two for Switzerland and two more for Paris.”

Ironically, Friedeberg is said to have fallen out of love with his most famous creation. “I hate them,” he is said to have exclaimed. “They’ve become like an icon or something.”

Of course, being folk art, the chairs are widely copied, though it’s easy to identify a bona fide Friedeberg chair. “Turn one upside down,” he advises, according to Martin. “At the bottom of the base, you should see my signature burned in.”

And in this case, the all-important signature was there.
There were many additional highlights in this diverse auction. They will be relayed in a future review.