1979 Tage Frid Stools
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APPRAISER:
I'd like to start off by asking a really important question: How do you pronounce your father's name?
GUEST:
"Tay-uh," Tage Frid.
APPRAISER:
Tage Frid-- it's Danish.
GUEST:
Exactly.
APPRAISER:
And your father came here in 1948?
GUEST:
Exactly.
APPRAISER:
It's so unusual to find a single piece of your father's work, it's so rare. You've got four. Please tell us what you know about these pieces.
GUEST:
Well, I inherited them from my father. And he got the idea sitting at a horse show, watching my brother and I. And he was noticing where his cheekbones were sitting on the fence. And he decided that three-legged stools always seemed to be kind of clunky, and they would fall over a lot, so he wanted something a little bit more refined.
APPRAISER:
Your father's production was limited compared to other people who designed 20th-century furniture because your father was a teacher.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
So he came first to work at Alfred?
GUEST:
Alfred University in New York, and then he went to R.I.T.'s School for American Craftsmen, and then in 1962, we moved here, and he was, started kind of the RISD furniture design.
APPRAISER:
At Rhode Island School of Design.
GUEST:
Exactly.
APPRAISER:
Started the first college-level furniture design course in America.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
APPRAISER:
My understanding is, your father had students make the stools, because everything they needed to know about woodworking was manifest in this form. Now, these are signed.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
But a lot of these were made by his students, because he wanted them to make them to show that they learned the skills he was teaching them.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
And to not have provenance, and to not have a mark, means it could be by anybody. At auction today, I would say the stools are worth between $7,500 and $10,000 each.
GUEST:
Oh, that's really nice.
APPRAISER:
Okay, so I think you've got about $30,000 to $40,000 worth of stools here.
GUEST:
Oh, that's great-- thanks, that's super.
APPRAISER:
You're welcome.
GUEST (laughs): Wow, thanks...
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