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The Faaborg chair Icon and inventory Munch, Anders V.

Published in: Faaborg Museum and the artists' colony

Publication date: 2019

Document version: Accepted manuscript

Citation for pulished version (APA): Munch, A. V. (2019). The Faaborg chair: Icon and inventory. In G. Hedin, & G. Hvidberg-Hansen (Eds.), Faaborg Museum and the artists' colony (pp. 216-233). Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

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Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 The Faaborg Chair. Icon and inventory

[Chapter from “Faaborg Museum and the Artist’s Colony”, eds. G. Hvidberg-Hansen & G. Hedin, Aarhus University Press 2019, pp. 216-33]

1. The Archives at Faaborg Museum used as the opening image of Arne Karlsen’s Dansk møbelkunst, 1990. 2. Carl Petersen, coloured drawing of the Archives at Faaborg Museum, indicating the positioning of furniture, February 1914. The Danish National Art Library. 3. , book cabinet, circa 1900. Made by Brd. H.P. Larsen. Private collection. 4. Kaare Klints Tegnestue, French cane work for the Faaborg Chair, October 1930. Blueprint for production at Rud. Rasmussens Snedkerier. The Danish National Art Library. 5. , the Red Chair, 1927 6. Henry van de Velde, the Diplomat’s Chair and the Secession Desk, exhibition at Münchener Sezession, reproduced in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 1899. 7. Variant of Kaare Klint’s and Carl Petersen’s Faaborg Chair at Dansk Kunsthandel, , 1917. 8. The architect balancing a Thonet Chair. Kritisk Revy, 1927. 9. Kaare Klint, sofa design, the Archives, circa 1914. Faaborg Museum. The Danish National Art Library.

Anders V. Munch Chairs are often lauded as the jewel in the crown of , acting as the main focal points of exhibitions and books alike. The ‘bible’ of Danish furniture design is Arne Karlsen’s Dansk møbelkunst i det 20. århundrede (1990), and the opening image of this seminal reference work is two Faaborg Chairs featured as part of the furnishings at the Archives in Faaborg Museum (ill. 1). It was a natural starting point for the book: this was the first commission received by Kaare Klint, who set up the School of Furniture (Skolen for Rumudstyr og Møbelkunst) at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Architecture in 1924. Hence, the Faaborg Chair has often formed the starting point of books and exhibitions which place emphasis on the Klint school. This certainly holds true of Arne Karlsen: as professor and rector at the Aarhus School of Architecture he was an advocate of the Klint school and of academic tradition. But it is equally true of the marketing materials created by the manufacturer of the chair, Rud. Rasmussens Snedkerier (now Carl Hansen & Søn), which has used the same terms in their appraisal: on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the chair – and of Carl Petersen’s building – they proclaimed the chair to be Denmark’s first modern design classic. The chair is also given pole position in the general cult surrounding Danish design classics, a movement that has only grown stronger in Denmark and on the international market alike since the year 2000, extending far beyond the furniture designs of the Klint school:

The Faaborg Chair ushered in a new era for Danish design, creating a foundation for its development and what we have come to associate with the phenomenon, which put Danish design on the world map in the 1950s. The movement proved to be a design treasure trove that has continued to inspire generations.1

Can a single chair embody all these things? Such invocations of ‘Danish design’ may tally well with a general faith in timeless values that can be pointedly expressed in iconic designs, mass-produced and passed down in the form of firm types and final solutions. However, it is a poorer match for the far more variegated plethora of plastic bowls, salad servers and upholstery foam chairs that came to characterise the Danish Modern movement – to say nothing of the very different way in which we perceive and consume this design today, even the classics. Danish media and companies write almost off-handedly about design icons and classics as part of a communal invocation of a shared tradition, but at the same time we cultivate the many little stories and widely different periods and contexts in which the objects first emerged and spread, perhaps even becoming fashionable, taking on varying meaning and significance. If we want to get to grips with what we truly mean by ‘icon’, ‘classic’ and ‘tradition’, it is well worth our while to take a closer look at the Faaborg Chair and its original context. Let us consider how the chair fits into and fulfils its original role – and those roles it has subsequently had thrust upon it. The chair was designed as part of Carl Petersen’s overall undertaking with Faaborg Museum, so he had the final word and had the chair made in close collaboration with the cabinetmaker N.M. Rasmussen in Holbæk. In many cases, the contributions made by junior members of staff who actually craft designs are not acknowledged. However, as a mentor of the enthusiastic young professionals found in Den fri Architektforening (The Free Architects’ Society) – a splinter group of Den Akademiske Architektforening (The Academic Architects’ Society), Petersen saw certain benefits in emphasising the work done by the young Klint, who was the son of one of the major master builders of the era, P.V. Jensen- Klint.2 The furniture for Faaborg Museum was Klint’s first official assignment, but he had already focused on furniture before, submitting proposals for several design competitions. As a result of their close co-operation – in Faaborg and on subsequent projects – Klint was able to take over Petersen’s assignments at two major Copenhagen art institutions, Thorvaldsens Museum and , when Petersen died an untimely death in 1923. And Klint was able to continue in this vein in connection with the major task of converting the interior of the former Frederiks Hospital, built 1752–57, into the new Museum of Decorative Arts (Det Danske Kunstindustrimuseum, now Designmuseum Danmark) in 1920–26. In this sense, Kaare Klint – or at least the role played by him – was Carl Petersen’s invention. The aforementioned photograph shows the two Faaborg chairs positioned exactly as indicated on the interior design sketches from 1914, but the photo is in black and white, meaning that it does not show the bold colours and striking materials that tie the room together. We look in through the door at the backlit furniture. We can only just make out the leather padding and wooden frame of the sofa, while the glossy stone top of the table dissolves in the reflected light. Even though the chairs become visually interwoven with the table legs, they nevertheless form neat silhouettes, hovering on the shiny floor with their cane work crisply outlined. Here the Faaborg Chair is presented in its original context, accentuated as a light, semi-transparent, yet decidedly sculptural chair that forms a definite contrast to the heavier furnishings that surrounds it. Even a photo may help tear an object out of its context, portraying it as an icon in its own right.

‘Spatial art’ We begin by looking at the chair in its original context. The eighteen chairs done for the museum in 1914 alongside seven stools in the same style were, of course, mostly intended to be placed around the various galleries inside the museum. They needed to be light, allowing visitors to move them around as required, and they should not be too distracting, directing attention away from the art or from the coloured walls and patterned floors. However, the drawings detailing the interior design pay more attention to how they would form part of the furnishings in the Archive, where Petersen would be better able to establish a firm composition of the room (ill. 2). The Funen painters would then have to agree on the hang of their works in the other rooms. The ‘Archive’ was a designation used for a room that differed from the painting galleries insofar as it was a public lounge area decorated like a living room. Given that they might also be used as seats when studying the print collection or for meetings, the chairs in this room needed to be light and flexible unlike the other, heavier, static furniture in the museum. But perhaps we might also see this contrast as one of Petersen’s ‘opposites’ or ‘contrasts’ (in Danish ‘modsætninger’), the title used for his much-reprinted 1920 lecture in which he advocated extensive, clear-cut lines and surfaces in order to create clear rhythms and strong contrasts. The sofa, bureau, shelves, mantlepiece clock and table all echo the pared-back classicism of the Empire style, simplified even further here to become pure surfaces and volumes, allowing the materials in themselves to interact strongly with the saturated colours of the walls and the stone floor. The clear-cut, well-ordered elements create a space where an array of birds – part of the wall murals painted by one of the artists featured in the museum, Johannes Larsen – can take their place as modern chinoiserie ornaments on Danish soil. According to various letters, Petersen monitored the artisans’ work on the furniture closely, making the following announcement to the patron behind the museum, Mads Rasmussen: ‘If you will permit me to voice my honest opinion, these pieces of furniture will be an event; the most beautiful ones created since the furniture of the old Danish artists was made’.3 The craftsmen were urged to pursue perfection and finesse in every nook and cranny of the furniture, including underneath the cushions of the sofa. With his reference to ‘the furniture of the old Danish artists’, the architect wished to posit himself within a revived tradition originating with Danish artists of the early nineteenth century – Nicolai Abildgaard, H.E. Freund and G.C. Hilker – who had designed simple, exquisitely refined furniture for their own homes in their search for greater artistic unity. This artistic endeavour to create unity in the artist’s home is transferred to the museum as a sphere for art where even the setting and objects of practical utility become part of the art. Seen in this light, the rounded toprail and outcurved back legs of the Faaborg Chair clearly reference the Greek klismos chairs that Abildgaard revived. Still, while the circular backrest is in perfect accord with the classically arranged geometric shapes when seen from above, the chair has such a pared-back structure that it leaves no space for ornamentation. The octagonal French cane work is a very prosaic solution familiar from utilitarian furniture. Yet at the same time the sheer simplicity of the design invites refined craftsmanship; the decision to use irregularly patterned burr oak in particular makes this a sophisticated chair. The furniture was exhibited at Kunstindustrimuseet as part of Den fri Architektforening’s exhibition prior to the opening of Faaborg Museum in 1915. The furniture for the Archive lent itself particularly well to being exhibited and was better at catching visitors’ eyes than the architectural drawings and models associated with the building. However, the critic and historian of architecture Vilhelm Wanscher, who was also associated with Den fri Architektforening, was the only reviewer to truly consider the furniture in his exhibition review: ‘Also exhibited are some fine, excellently executed pieces of furniture made from oak root; these are intended for the museum’s Archives. Best among these pieces are the armchairs, which are very light, yet occupy their space in a sculptural fashion from whichever angle one sees them (an excellent critique offered by one of the younger painters)’.4 The fact that he is the only critic impertinent enough to forget to mention Klint, as was touched upon before, rather irked the proud debutante. Stung vanity notwithstanding, we note that Wanscher considers the Faaborg Chair in isolation, describing it in terms that would since be a recurring feature of the many portrayals of this as the ur-chair of Danish furniture design: a light, sculptural composition in three-dimensional space. This decision to address the chair in isolation is remarkable given the special interest at this time – prominent in Petersen – in the overall artistic interplay between art forms. As the director of Det Danske Kunstindustrimuseum, Emil Hannover, states in 1918: ‘Moreover, there was a general realisation of the necessity of having the different arts, hitherto separated, find each other again, of having them merge with one another, form a unity, a “Spatial Art”’.5 Some artists and critics felt that the source of art dried up when the various art forms were cultivated in isolation, becoming barren bravura displays with no real significance in wider cultural and social contexts. Painting in particular served as a starting point for artists to diversify and spread out into various veins of applied arts, experimenting with practical design in artistic ways; some ventured so far afield that they entered the realm of architecture. Klint had begun his career as a painter before becoming an autodidact furniture designer and architect. This transition was one that he had in common with his father, Jensen-Klint, but also with a wide range of international figures within the early development of modern architecture and design, including William Morris, Henry van de Velde, Peter Behrens and many more. Petersen was a graduate from the school of architecture, but he worked intensively with ceramics, amassing artistic experiences that he transferred to the realm of architecture. Like many others, he regarded the school of architecture as rather dry and academic in its exercises in style, and he would eventually spearhead a break away from the older generation at the school. The various takes on a new kind of ‘spatial art’ experimenting with colour, light, rhythm, space and textural materiality inspired by painting and various forms of applied arts opened up new – or forgotten – dimensions of the art of building. In his lectures and articles, Petersen referred to the two Danish architects C.F. Hansen and M.G. Bindesbøll, who spearheaded neoclassicism during the first half of the nineteenth century, and to the Danish Baroque and Gothic periods while also invoking his experiences with painting, ceramics, textiles, woodwork and metalwork and their ‘material’ or ‘textural effects’ (in Danish ‘stoflige virkninger’).

Simplification and material effect We see, then, that the simplification and keen awareness of material and craftsmanship evident in the Faaborg Chair is entwined with this general interconnection of art and crafts as a painterly (or simply artistic) outlook on space, light and materials. A similar interest in the fusion of the various arts can be observed throughout Europe around the year 1900, and in Denmark a number of figures represent various variants of such interconnections on a smaller scale. They are particularly to be found among the independent Danish artists who set up their own exhibition venue, Den Frie Udstilling, which included applied arts and furniture from as far back as 1893. The most obvious among these figures in our context would be Johan Rohde, who was Klint’s teacher at Kunstnernes Studieskole in 1907. Without ever abandoning painting, Rohde worked intensively with furniture in the late 1890s, creating stringently stylised pieced with simplified ornamentation. He worked with pure surfaces and stringent curves that allowed the qualities of the wood to take centre stage: its veining, its sophisticated treatment and the restrained carved detailing. If we consider his bookcase from around 1900, we find that the columns of classicist furniture have been transformed into an overall arrangement of the surface that divides up the large volume of the case, joining the tapering profiles at the base and top in creating rhythm (ill. 3). Klint makes distinctive use of tapered and stepped finishes in his furniture, exemplified here by his sofa, shelves and bureau, as part of his endless work with proportions, segmentation and scale. Danish design historian Mirjam Gelfer-Jørgensen, an expert on nineteenth- century furniture, points towards Rohde’s furniture as the starting point of modern Danish furniture.6 The fact that most other writers pick out the Faaborg Chair, overlooking or deliberately discounting Rohde, is presumably due to the fact that the latter only created special designs for particular dwellings; he never sought to create solutions with universal applicability. If one regards this approach as part of the celebration of personality and individual style dominant around 1900, this was a tendency to which Klint and Petersen were both clearly opposed. However, Rohde’s use of entirely pure forms, an effort that he himself described as ‘paring back the worst knots from the matter of taste’, does not constitute a cultivation of an idiosyncratic style. Conversely, the furniture for Faaborg Museum were in fact a special commission, and even though Klint had variants of the chair made for other interiors, it was not put into production until 1931. One might highlight the fact that the chair is more stringent and modern in appearance than the rest of the furnishings of the Archive – and than Rohde’s designs – but with its clean curves and exquisite workmanship it is entirely exclusive and certainly no standard solution. The cultivation of personality that dominated the years around 1900 and greatly influenced the Danish Art Nouveau, known as ‘Skønvirke’, was counteracted by the generations of classicists and modernists that followed, based on the idea that a great artist can reach beyond the realm of the purely personal to strike upon something universal, either in the form of classical order or as contributions to the common good. Himself a functionalist, the Danish architect and cultural critic Poul Henningsen accentuated the importance of general, universal design, of type. ‘The more personality is eradicated in the execution of a task, the greater the artistic result’.7 Similar views were also strong in Klint, but we should note how this in no way meant that creating something of worth required any less personality or artistic effort. The sense of self was not diminished. The crucial matter was whether the efforts focused on the most important aspects of artistic and cultural evolution. ‘The Greeks expended their faculties of invention on the orders of columns, the Romans on the ground- plan. And he who can resolve the great ground plan does not give thought to new profiles’, as the Viennese architect Adolf Loos put it.8 Loos’s distinction between different types of classical architecture points towards a shift in focus which meant that a different aspect of antiquity came to drive modern architecture – the grand overall lines that lead people along and shape life rather than ornament and decoration. The quote is a very apt description of how Petersen resolves the ground plan while designing for the difficult elongated site in Faaborg – using devices from Roman villas as well. Still, profiles continued to play an important part for the architect: Petersen had decided the that the outer profile of the toprail of the Faaborg Chair was to have a vertical plane, but Klint changed this when the chair was later put into production. In fact, we see something similar in Loos’s furniture, which shares many similarities with Rohde and Klint alike. It may be more accurate to say that the key shift seen here resided in the fact that they did not think of themselves as inventing anything new. Loos and Klint both took their point of departure in classic types of furniture, simplifying them as required. And they both put great emphasis on craftsmanship and exquisite quality. Klint’s furniture has a close kinship with the kind of minimalism and material aesthetic advocated by Loos in lectures throughout Europe. He essentially spoke in favour of a new culture of joinery to counteract the widespread culture of upholstery that had become so firmly embedded during the second half of the nineteenth century.9 The culture of joinery, of woodworking, is crucial to Klint, who seeks out alternatives to upholstery in leather and canework, and this approach would come to form a leitmotif within the Klint school, leading to demonstrative evasions and even rather far-fetched variants of the familiar, comfortable upholstered furniture which must no longer be allowed to hide its construction and materials (ill. 4). In this regard the Faaborg Chair can be said to constitute an early role model with its pliable, transparent cane work that helps firm up the structure – unlike upholstery, which would also have required a sturdier, heavier frame. To this we must add the other dimension that should be incorporated from ‘spatial art’ and classicist sensibilities: the ‘material’ or ‘textural’ effects. Petersen gave a lecture bearing this very title (‘stoflige virkninger’) in 1919; a lecture that would since become a key text in the schooling of Danish architects. Here he applied a range of experiences and observations from the craftsman’s handling of various materials, considering how they may govern the visual and spatial effect of furniture. For materials such as marble, ceramic glazes, wood and metal, the surface treatment is key: ‘in order for a given material to make a pleasant impression, it must have a clear, firm surface’.10 If a layer of glossy varnish or glaze allows one to sense an indeterminate space beneath the surface, this prevents the observer from experiencing a firm connection with the material. Wood only takes on its truest, most valuable character over time as washing and wear gradually breaks the light against its surface. This is why the furniture created for Faaborg Museum is treated with a wax polish only, reflecting an approach that became a key dimension of the Klint school: creating furniture where the pure materials could be enhanced by use and the build-up of patina.

Functionalism The Faaborg Chair may reasonably and meaningfully be pointed out as an initial marker of the subsequent struggle to promote a culture of joinery and a modern aesthetic of materials even though it has definite precursors in the works of Rohde and in the artist-made furniture of the Danish Golden Age of Romanticism. Seeing the chair as a guiding light for other aspects of the functionalism adhered to by the Klint pupils presents greater difficulties. But then again, those aspects did not necessarily tally with Klint’s own perception of the ideals. ‘Even though Klint openly rejected viewing functionalism as a break with any precursors, this is precisely the way his followers have presented him’.11 In this quote, the Danish business historian, Per H. Hansen, criticises the way in which Klint has been made the father of modern Danish furniture design. The Faaborg Chair is clearly affiliated with the historic precursors mentioned here. As Hansen says, functionalism should not necessarily be regarded as a clean break with the past – as indeed Klint did not. One of the important elements of functionalism resides in its work with types as a universal solution, carefully worked through in functional and aesthetic terms so that it can be disseminated. Working with types became a key aspect of the Klint school. Unlike Bauhaus, but in accord with the ideas of Loos – and of Henningsen in his article ‘Tradition og Modernisme’ from 1927 – Klint took his point of departure in traditional types of furniture. Pieces such as the Red Chair (1927) and the Church Chair (1936) directly echo or combine aspects of old types of chairs such as Chippendale designs and Mediterranean peasant chairs (Ill. 5). The former was used by Klint himself in various variations, while the latter was Klint’s only design to enter industrial mass production. The Faaborg Chair can only be regarded as a type in the rather narrower sense that Klint subsequently used several variants on the design for other interiors, and that it formed part of Rud. Rasmussen’s range of handmade furniture from 1931 onwards. However, it did not directly draw on older types adapted through generations of use. Nor was it designed with mass production in mind; it was conceived as an element – light and transparent – in the museum as a setting for art and in the Archive as part of its overall ‘spatial art’. Its functional virtues notwithstanding, it is difficult to see this chair as a role model for functionalism’s work with type. Nor does the Faaborg Chair seem to foreshadow or feature traits of the work on measuring the human body and the functional relationship with the body that became such a key characteristic of the teachings of the Klint school. The height and overall arrangement of the chair is directly connected with that of the other furniture of the intended interior: the chair and sofa share the same seat height, and the toprail of the chair follows the height of the table. This runs counter to the principles outlined in the Klint school’s manifesto on furniture design, ‘Om Møbeltegning’ from 1930: ‘I recall a dining room in which all the furniture, for reasons of harmony, adhered to the same height in spite of their very different functions: the height of the table top. The result proved anything but harmonious, as one felt quite contorted in body’.12 However, the comprehensive systematic work that he and his pupils would subsequently carry out, involving extensive measuring and adaptation, often ended up with the same kind of perfect correlation of proportion, and it is not quite clear whether the overall objective was a striving for classical order or a process of standardisation and the creation of modules for mass production. ‘Ironically enough, Klint employed modern, Taylor-driven, functional principles in the design process, yet he chose traditional and expensive handcraftmanship for their execution’.13 Here we come upon Hansen’s key point of criticism regarding Klint himself. When we consider most of Klint’s furniture, we see clear, logical arguments underpinning their form, measurements, proportions and construction, but no such reasoning behind the choice of the often-costly types of wood selected and the expensive process of crafting by hand. The central point of Hansen’s book on Danish Modern Furniture is that this lapse of logic within an otherwise consistent set of ideals would later, in the 1950s, quite ironically make it possible for Danish mass-produced furniture to be marketed by means of strong references to joinery, cabinetmaking and art as part of a national Danish tradition. In this context, the museum chair from Faaborg served excellently as an archetype.

Contemporaries The various stories created about Danish furniture design, the Klint pupils and the promotion of Danish design through exhibitions, general education initiatives and advertisements have all attributed great significance to the Faaborg Chair, but how well do these narratives tally with the chair’s significance, importance and reception in its own historic context? In addition to the immediate precursors enumerated in the above, I will offer my take on some wider Scandinavian and European parallels and contexts that may form a basis for assessing the background from which the chair emerged. If we continue to take functionalism as the backdrop of our inquiry, one of the earliest and most prominent articulations of this idea can be found in Swedish art historian Gregor Paulsson’s book Vackrara Vardagsvara from 1916. While this book was, of course, published after the chair was created, Paulsson sums up a range of ideas found in the German Werkbund movement, which was familiar to Danish audiences from articles and exhibitions alike. And even though he does not use the term ‘functionalism’ in itself, he does express the fundamental ideas that would infuse the thinking behind Scandinavian functionalism. Klint and Paulsson are entirely in accord as regards the cultural and societal mission of improving general tastes so that they do not veer towards aristocratic luxury, but rather towards well-made everyday objects of great aesthetic and functional quality. Even though the Faaborg Chair was created for a museum, the design could be taken out of that context and used in homes. But whereas Paulsson addressed all of society in his thinking, urging the applied arts and the realm of retail to join forces in order to develop and promote goods of greater quality, Klint made few ventures towards such dialogue and is unlikely to have regarded any of his furniture as ‘commodities’ – even though his graphic designs for advertising for the Danish car manufacturer Triangel was a spot-on take on the industrial culture developed by artists and industrialists in Werkbund. Werkbund was founded in 1907 in Dresden, where the arts and crafts workshop Deutsche Werkstätten had already evolved into a furniture factory whose range of everyday furniture – Dresdner Hausgerät, designed by figures such as artist Richard Riemerschmid – represented the earliest mass-production of a wide furniture range. We see no hints of such ambitions in Klint; in Denmark this mode of thought later finds expression in FDB-møbler – the furniture programme of the Danish Cooperative Consumers’ Association launched in 1942. When considering the Faaborg Chair, it actually makes more sense to look further back than Werkbund in order to contemplate the artistic interiors created by figures such as Henry van de Velde for art collectors, galleries and similar artistic settings (ill. 6). The 1897 armchair exhibited alongside the so-called Secession desk shares certain similarities with the Faaborg Chair in terms of type and function, given that it too acts as an armchair designed to fit the table. Even though Velde’s chair is heavier in appearance, it had a nimble, dynamic air in its own time, and Velde intended to have his furniture mass produced. Executed in the Jugendstil look, this chair is very clearly part of the overall artistic décor, a genre that encompassed study, salon and art collection settings, even including the storage facilities used to archive prints and other art collectibles. The Archive at the Faaborg Museum is an example of this genre within interior design. Devoid of the ornamental lines seen in Velde’s design, the Faaborg Chair also lends itself to salon use, a fact accentuated by the variants of the chair which Klint used in 1917 for the Copenhagen shop of the Danish cigar company Hirschsprung and when co-operating with Petersen on the premises of the art gallery Dansk Kunsthandel, also in Copenhagen. For these settings, the chairs were heavier, less open in appearance (ill. 7). Unlike posterity, contemporary audiences did not regard the light, open cane-work structure as an asset. In fact, even the denser version created for Dansk Kunsthandel was criticised in 1918 as being too flimsy compared to the other furnishings shown at an exhibition of Danish architecture, decorative art and applied arts at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm: ‘If one were to criticise anything regarding Klint’s excellent furniture, the chairs might be considered somewhat too delicate and light in relation to the table and the coffin-like engraving cabinet, which are so

14 massive and magnificent’. Four drawings of the furnishings for Faaborg Museum were included at this exhibition, but they are not mentioned in the review printed here in the journal published by Svenske Slöjdförening, a leading arbiter of taste. The furniture for the Copenhagen art gallery were pronounced an ‘event’ and received in-depth attention in the review. Indeed, it would seem that the furniture for the art gallery attracted much more attention that the Faaborg interior around this time.15 When Klint created interiors in private homes during this time, he used the heavier version of the chair. Private homeowners wanted a salon chair. They would have associated their new piece of furniture with the museum – or the art gallery – esteeming it as part of an exquisitely tasteful décor. Attracting commissions for the David Collection and Thorvaldsens Museum in addition to Faaborg Museum, Petersen’s and Klint’s work became closely associated with museums, attaining elevated artistic status; it was certainly not linked to standard solutions and mass production. If the objective was solely to create a light, flexible chair in a strictly functionalist sense, there were other, far less expensive routes that one might have pursued. In 1927, the leading Danish avant-garde journal Kritisk Revy ran a headline asking ‘What is modern industrial arts?’ accompanied by a picture of Henningsen balancing a Thonet chair on his finger (ill. 8). Bentwood chairs with cane seats of this type had been industrially manufactured by the Thonet company since the mid-nineteenth century. We may take it as read that Klint wanted to do something other and more than that type of chair. However, there is a definite and pointed sting to Henningsen’s text below the painting: ‘An architect may well carve out a name for himself by making this chair five times more expensive, three times heavier, only half as comfortable and possessing just a quarter of its beauty’.16 The Faaborg Chair springs to mind, but the words should be regarded as a general critique of how architects still tended towards designing luxury furniture. He believed that the true objective ought to be ‘classless’ furniture, and he particularly accentuated this aspect of the Thonet chair:

It engages with its mission in society with the same dutiful diligence that we expect from any proper citizen. What more do you require from a chair? Should it also parade an exalted status that you yourself do not possess? Should it brag of your elevated culture and tax-paying bracket in ways that you yourself would be ashamed to do? 17

In Dansk møbelkunst, Arne Karlsen includes a quote by Henningsen about the Thonet chair, taken from ‘Tradition og Modernisme’, in order to demonstrate how closely his way of thinking was related to that of Klint.18 However, Klint never strove to create inexpensive, unpretentious or classless furniture in Henningsen’s sense, and the Faaborg Chair was created in a different context and with different intentions than the ideological project of functionalism. And given that Klint’s clients had mainly wanted the heavier variant originally created for Dansk Kunsthandel, the matter of what prompted the manufacturer Rud. Rasmussen to include it in their product range – meaning that it has gone from being a special commission for the museum to being in production since 1931 – remains an open question. In a prolonged discussion about the developments of Danish design, opened in 1962 by Arne Karlsen and Børge Mogensen, Henningsen distances himself from their point of view, confirming that his 1927 critique had the Faaborg Chair in mind. He reaffirms his position:

The verdict I will sign again to-day, having lived a good part of my life with both the Faaborg and the Vienna chair. The latter cuts into your back, but it had been possible to develop and improve it. The Faaborg chair was an untouchable work of art, a monument of something that has never been sacred to me, a handsome ruin in which one could not sit without nostalgia for the past.19

While he regards the Thonet chair (in Danish ‘wienerstol’) as a type or classic that can be developed and reworked, he sees the Faaborg Chair as an untouchable icon.

Icon The Faaborg Chair shows its true quality in the context for which it was made at Faaborg Museum. Here it recedes gracefully into the background in the painting galleries, allowing the works of art and the intense colours of the floors and walls to take centre stage while still revealing itself as an elegantly shaped and crafted chair once you notice it. It asserts itself more insistently when viewed up against the light or against the more neutral backdrop of the stone floor in the Archive. Here it interacts harmoniously with the other furnishings, including the stools done in the same style, thereby establishing a connection between the galleries and the Archive. The Archive represents a different kind of link between painting, furniture and architecture, yet accentuates how similar unity can also be found in the rest of the museum. Such understated, but carefully crafted aesthetic and functional quality has been accentuated above all else as a pivotal feature of Danish furniture design, indeed of design in general. Viewed in this light, it makes sense to present the Faaborg Chair as the starting point and role model of that tradition. However, observers should be aware of the extent to which it also picks up on a tradition that dates back to Danish artist-made furniture from the early nineteenth century and to Johan Rohde, a fact which Klint himself regarded as an important point. To this we may add that the distinctive qualities pointed out here appear to be very intimately connected to Klint’s collaboration with Petersen: the close interplay with the museum architecture, the pared-back classicism and the focus on materiality. Many have highlighted Klint’s much later statement from 1940 in which he takes stock of the design: ‘The main form of these is due to me, while the profiling is clearly influenced by “Calle’s” exquisite culture’.20 However, if we hark back to their 1914 correspondence, Petersen would appear to loom large over everything, and the rigorous demands he imposed on his craftsmen must have served not only as a fundamental condition, but also as inspiration for Klint. The most rigid example is provided by Petersen’s specifications for the sofa (ill. 9):

Sofa A sofa is to be done. As regards the veneer on the end pieces, the architect shall decide where the squares will be cut from the veneer pieces and how they should be positioned within the field. The direction of all other veneers shall be determined in consultation with the architect. Inside, the back, seat and curved sides are to be covered in oak burl as on the exterior. All cushioning and padding is to be upholstered recto and verso in leather. The quality is determined as per the sample presented, the colour and stitching following detailed negotiations between the architect, the leatherseller and the saddler.21

The demands are no less meticulous for the other parts of the museum furnishings. Such cultivation of minute details of materials and execution is also evident in the furniture of the Klint school, and seen in this light, Petersen’s ‘exquisite culture’ played a rather more prominent part than simply affecting the profiles that Klint changed back again after his master’s death. The stylistic idiom of the Faaborg Chair can be equally much said to mark the end of classicism as the beginning of something else. The circular toprail and curved back legs fit in well with older classical architecture, whether understated or not, and it is rarely shown in the kind of white, modern rooms favoured by many photographs of furniture. Apart from a few exercises conducted by the Klint school, such as Rud Thygesen’s and Johnny Sørensen’s King’s Chair, the form and structure of the chair has not been the object of reinvention or a source of inspiration the way that other pivotal pieces of furniture have. If we choose to see Hans J. Wegner’s Wishbone Chair from 1950 as a direct scion, we certainly see an armchair design finding very wide application. However, the Wishbone Chair has other, more direct antecedents than the Faaborg Chair. Chairs with toprail armrests and cane work have been recurring elements in furniture tradition, but no Klint pupil engaged directly with the Faaborg Chair. Rather, they have treated it as an unassailable icon. It has not had the same kind of afterlife as those furniture classics which have continually been presented in new contexts, reinterpreted, sampled and imbued with new significance and uses, for example in the Thonet Chair for example. Still, the Faaborg Chair has been made a design icon: it continues to be pointed out and presented as an embodiment of the ideas underpinning the Danish design tradition. It can also be lauded as a strong debut for Klint as a master of tradition. Petersen was highly successful in paving the way for the future of Klint and furniture design in general by taking him on board in Faaborg and later recommending Klint in other contexts. If we look at four aspects that can be identified as important to what we call ‘design icons’ – reception, representation, recognition, admiration – the chair has been received and depicted as a symbol in both words and images.22 Its image has been reproduced in countless books about design tradition, and it has been photographed from every angle, enabling us to recognise its pure lines in any context. Finally, it was and still is admired, regardless of whether it is seen as the ‘ur-chair’ of Danish furniture design, as part of the wider historic and artistic context of the Danish art scene leading up to World War I, or as part of the overall design of Faaborg Museum, Carl Petersen’s Gesamtkunstwerk.

1 Denmark’s First Modern Design Classic. Celebrating 100 Years, Rud. Rasmussen brochure, 2014, p. 4. 2 Petersen and Klint are jointly listed as having designed the furniture in the catalogue for Den fri Architektforeningens Udstilling at the Kunstindustrimuseum (now ), January/February 1915, and their collaboration is also duly mentioned in the reviews. Nevertheless, Gorm Harkær reports that Klint subsequently felt overlooked, obliging Petersen to reaffirm their collaboration to Emil Hannover and Vilhelm Wanscher, Kaare Klint, vol. 1, Klintiana, Copenhagen 2010, p. 89. 3 Petersen in a letter to Mads Rasmussen, 15.7.1914, Faaborg Byhistoriske Arkiv (Faaborg City Archives). 4 Vilhelm Wanscher in Hovedstaden, 22.1.1915. See also the introduction, Munch, ‘Translating Space and Mass into Danish. On Wilhelm Wanscher’, Nordic Journal of Architecture, Vol. 2, 2012, 98–105, and an article on Wanscher’s description of Faaborg Museum as setting new standards for the nomenclature used within Danish architectural tradition, Munch, ‘Om at opleve – og italesætte – arkitektur: Arkitektursynet i omtaler af Faaborg Museum’, Kunstakademiets Arkitektskoler 2017, https://kadk.dk/sites/default/files/downloads/news/mellemhuseogord_sidetal.pdf 5 Emil Hannover, Det nittende Aarhundredes Malerkunst, Copenhagen 1918, p. 185. See also Anders V. Munch, ’Heraus aus den Goldrahmen. Rohde, Hannover und die Idee von der Vereinigung der Kunstarten’, Hvidberg- Hansen, Gertrud & Gertrud Oelsner (ed.), ‘Johan Rohde. Ein dänische Künstler der Moderne’, Bröhan-Museum, Berlin, 2006, pp. 69-83, and Fra Bayreuth til Bauhaus. Gesamtkunstwerk’et og de moderne kunstformer, Aarhus Universitetsforlag 2012. 6 Mirjam Gelfer-Jørgensen on Rohde’s furniture in Hvidberg-Hansen & Oelsner, op.cit. 7 Poul Henningsen, ‘Sporvognen som Kunst. Betragtninger over Type og Smag, Kunst og Mode’, Nyt Tidsskrift for Kunstindustri, 1930, p. 52. 8 Adolf Loos, Architectur, 1910, Trotzdem, Wien 1998, p. 103. ‘Die griechen verschwendeten ihre erfindungskraft in der säulenordnung, die römer verwendeten sie auf den grundriß. Und wer den großen grundriß lösen kann, der denkt nich an neue profilierungen’. Judging by the minutes, this text was featured in the lecture given by Loos in Copenhagen on 5 April 1913, see Architekten 12.4. If Klint did not attend to hear Loos himself, he was certainly close to the circles that did. Politiken 6.4. mentions that Povl Baumann was in attendance at Studenterforeningen and that Loos’s name came up in a discussion concerning the spire of Frue Kirke and the reassessment of neo-classical architecture orchestrated by Petersen. 9 Adolf Loos, ‘Interieurs’, 1898, Ins Leere gesprochen, Prachner, Wien 1997, pp. 70f. 10 Carl Petersen, Stoflige Virkninger, 1919, Cras XXIV, 1983, p. 22. 11 Per H. Hansen, Danish Modern Furniture 1930-2016, University Press of Southern Denmark 2018, p. 43. 12 Kaare Klint, ‘Om Møbeltegning’, Arkitektens Maanedshæfte, October 1930, p. 196. 13 Ibid., p. 38. 14 Ragnar Hoppe, ‘Den Danska Utställningen’, Svenska Slöjdföreningens Tidskrift, vol. XIV, 1918, p. 14. 15 When Dansk Kunsthandel closed down after a few years, the furnishings were sold to Kunstindustrimuseet. However, the museum simply used the pieces as office furniture, and it would appear that they were never on public display. One might reasonably suspect that they did not fit in well with the general image subsequently cultivated about Klint. Particularly after the 1925 Paris Exhibition, the style of this furniture would have reminded people of Art Deco. 16 Poul Henningsen, ‘Hvad er sand Kunstindustri?’, Kritisk Revy 4, 1927, p. 58. 17 Ibid. 18 Karlsen, op.cit., pp. 80-83. This passage suggests that Henningsen and Klint were more in agreement on this point than is generally assumed. There are similarities between the two in terms of their ideas about ‘tradition’ and ’type’, but the way standardisation was taught at the academy does not accommodate Henningsen’s critique of the architects’ luxury furniture. 19 Henningsen, Mobilia 81, 1962, no page numbers, text in Danish, English, German and French (English by Elsa Gress). 20 Quoted in Gorm Harkær, Kaare Klint, vol. 1, Klintiana, Copenhagen 2010, p. 85. 21 Archival material from the museum quoted from Faaborg Museum. Møbler og inventar, 2006, p. 29. 22 The four aspects are accentuated in Grace Lees-Maffei, Iconic Designs. 50 stories about 50 things, Bloomsbury, London 2014, pp. 7–13.