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Lot Essay
Finn Juhl is today celebrated as a furniture designer and cultural figure who created the concept of ‘Danish Design’ and paved the way for the global rise of Danish furniture in the 1950s and 1960s. Proudly independent, unlike his contemporaries who exhibited at the Copenhagen Cabinetmaker’s Guild exhibitions – the central platform of the Danish design industry – Juhl had neither been trained as a cabinetmaker and also had not studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and Design under Kaare Klint, and so did not feel bound by their conventions, and thus felt free to move away from the traditions of craftsmanship within furniture design. To integrate one of his central beliefs over the symbiosis of art and design Juhl first presented the current armchair alongside tribal art, weapons and utilitarian objects on his stand at the 1949 Copenhagen Cabinetmakers’ Guild Exhibition, held at the then Kunstindustrimuseet (now the Design Museum, Denmark). Juhl related that when the exhibition was opened, King Frederick IX of Denmark had tried the chair, and the designer was asked by a journalist if it should now be called ‘the King’s chair’, to which he had responded ‘you had better call it a chieftain’s chair’. The chair was the highlight of the exhibition, with one journalist writing ‘[the chair]…is so full of life that it seems to be almost quivering with vitality. It is as expensive and as delicate as a thoroughbred must be….’. Most notably in his work he separated the seat and back from the bearing wooden frame, separating the constructive elements of a work which follows Gerrit Rietveld’s red-blue chair of 1917 and Elling sideboard, designed 1919, which also explore this theme and both of which can be seen in this catalogue. Today, with the linear arrangement of the supports and legs contrasting with the curvaceous fluidity of the organic ‘floating’ back and seat, it is acclaimed as a key work of international mid-century modernism.