Kagan’s designs for seating were among his most innovative and “taught us how seating should be arranged in a room,” says Barbara Diesroth, a 20th-century decorative arts consultant. For example, he envisioned the curvaceous Serpentine Sofa “floating” in the center of the room and saw his Omnibus collection, a modular multi-directional seating group, perched at different levels. (Tastemakers agree: A longtime Kagan fan, designer Tom Ford chose Omnibus pieces for all 360 Gucci stores worldwide and hotelier André Balazs selected Omnibus multi-level seating for the lobby of the new Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.)

Reissues of Kagan’s midcentury designs are available at Dennis Miller Associates showroom in

VK Chaise, 1999, aluminum base and red leather upholstery.

New York. Consisting of more than 50 designs, the Kagan New York Collection is priced to the trade from $2,800 for a coffee table to chairs at $8,000 and sofas from $10,000 to $15,000. A notch up, Kagan’s Sculpture Collection at Ralph Pucci International showrooms in New York and West Hollywood, California, is manufactured in Italy and similar in construction and detail to the original design. (Lounge chairs are approximately $8,000; a large Serpentine sofa is more than $13,000.)

Stasis is certainly not part of the lexicon for this designer whose creations are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil Am Rhein, Germany, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Kagan recently ventured outdoors, creating a collection of all-weather furniture for Barlow Tyrie. The English garden furniture company introduced the group made of newly developed plastic rattan at London’s Decorex in September and High Point market in October.

His contributions to midcentury design earned him a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Furniture Designers in 2000 and the Brooklyn Museum of Art/MODERNISM in 2002. He also received an unusual honor in the university town of Freiburg, Germany, where a local night spot furnished with Omnibus seating has been named “The Kagan Club”—a rather bizarre footnote in the biography of this designer who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 with his family. They settled in New York City, where Kagan’s woodworker father opened a cabinet shop and Kagan enrolled in the High School of Industrial Design, where he studied clay modeling, anatomy and sculpture—disciplines that all would come into play in his future designs.

His work in clay helped him develop a sense for amorphous shapes. His knowledge of anatomy informed furniture designs that offered comfort and firm support of the spine. But most significantly, Kagan credits his study of sculpture for the free-form quality of his postwar designs. “I have always approached design like a sculpture, emphasizing the interplay of structure and form, of space and light,” he says.