Design: Century of Scattered Flowers

A dazzling exhibit sheds fresh light on Scandinavian modern

For smart newlyweds of a generation ago, their home, the first rung on the ladder of upward mobility, was almost inevitably furnished with “Danish modern,” complete with Marimekko textiles, stainless-steel cutlery and plain white tableware. There was no better way to show modernity. Recently, however, modern Scandinavian design seems to have vanished from public awareness in the U.S. Much of it has been poorly adapted and absorbed by U.S. mass culture. In addition, it is no longer modern to be modern.

“Scandinavian Modern: 1880-1980,” the dazzling exhibition that opens this week at New York City’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum, hits us, therefore, like a massive surprise attack. Some 330 masterworks of furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork and textiles show that Scandinavian design is not so much a style as a visual morality, a powerful force for beauty and meaning. Nor is the modern mode of Scandinavian design frozen into an abstract machine aesthetic. It is a creative way of meeting changing practical and emotional needs. Seen in this context, Danish modern is fresh, exciting and timeless. Like Finnish Architect Alvar Aalto’s bentwood armchair (circa 1929) or Norwegian Eystein Sandnes’ 1959 porcelain tableware, Danish modern transcends fashion.

The Cooper-Hewitt, which is the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design, has organized and displayed this exhibition with its usual flair. Scandinavian design, says the museum’s sumptuous exhibition catalogue (published in hard cover by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.; $45), “scatters flowers before your feet and lays the pale colors and mild beauty of the Nordic summer before your eyes. Less apparent is the truth that this sunny effect is achieved against a background of darkness, cold, ice and snow.”

This “winter design” gives the domestic furnishings of Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland a common quality. It is a painstaking, brooding, almost mystical devotion to perfection in craftsmanship and thoughtfulness in art. The effort is focused on the home because for many snowed-in months there is no other place to focus on. Says Cooper-Hewitt Curator of Decorative Arts David Revere McFadden, who organized the show: “Whether they are made by hand or machine, Scandinavia’s virtuoso designs are both art and craft. Distinction between the two would merely spoil our joy of appreciating them.”

One of the principal sources of Scandinavian design is Viking art. Viking revival artifacts, like the carved and painted turn-of-the-century dragon chair of Norway’s Gerhard Munthe, mark the beginning of a specifically Scandinavian arts and crafts movement. The world first became aware of it when Scandinavian textiles, porcelains, furniture and architecture were shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris.

Since then, Nordic designers have given every European style their distinct mark. Denmark’s Georg Jensen’s silver and opal Dragonfly brooch (1904) and fellow Dane Erik Magnussen’s Grasshopper brooch (1907) of silver and coral are unmistakably art nouveau. They are also unmistakably Scandinavian. Like virtually all the objects in this exhibition, they show the patient toil brought to bear on stubborn, natural materials. This is what Frank Lloyd Wright called “organic” design.

The marvelous “mushroom” vases of Finland’s Tapio Wirkkala (1946-47) are another example of this. Wirkkala’s artistic craft ennobles ordinary glass. It turns an industrial material into a living one. The same is true of Denmark’s Finn Juhl’s famous armchair of 1945 and, for that matter, all Danish-modern wood furniture. The sensuous, sculptural shapes seem to flow into one organic unit.

Poul Kjærholm of Denmark achieved this natural—and thus human—quality with a lithe chair (1957) in which steel undergirds a swath of cane woven into a combined seat and back rest. The object’s elegance surpasses any seating Marcel Breuer or Le Corbusier ever designed in steel and leather.

The few objects in the show that were clearly conceived and engineered on the drawing board are far less appealing and not characteristically Scandinavian. The floor and table lamps (1979) of Denmark’s Claus Bonderup and Torsten Thorup are dated high-tech novelty items. Norwegians Svein Gusrud and Hans Christian Mengshoel’s Balans Activ chair contraption (1979), made in Norway, is equally uncharming. It consists of a kneepad connected by steel tubes to a padded seat, all of which is supposed to relieve pressure on the spine. It is, instead, a pain in the eyes.

The foremost masterpieces in modern Scandinavian design are still those of the familiar masters, among them Aalto, Wirkkala, Denmark’s Arne Jacobsen, and Sweden’s Gunnar Asplund and Sven Markelius. But there are also many new names to reassure us that the tradition need not regress to mannerist neodeco or yield to the common denominator of market-researched commercialism. Scandinavian design, in fact, is still as vigorous at the end of this century as it was at the beginning.

— By Wolf Von Eckardt