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Abstract
This essay interrogates the influence of Shaker furniture on mid-century Danish design. Though but one among many international and historical referents, the Shaker one was, I argue, crucial to the positive reception and powerful significance of Danish design in the postwar United States. I begin with an analysis of formal resemblance and then contextualize the legibility and the significance of this resemblance within popular culture. The article aims both to consider the ramifications of design influence beyond the construction of formal genealogies and to advance our historical understanding of mid-century Danish design’s structural intervention into modernism at large.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2014 CAA panel “The Influence of Scandinavian Design in America", chaired by Bobbye Tigerman and moderated by Kjetil Fallan. Thanks are due to Bobbye, Kjetil, and the panelists – Erin Leary, Monica Obniski, and Leena Svinhufvud. I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers at Design & Culture for their careful reading and excellent feedback. For invaluable conversations, comments, and questions, I would also like to thank, above all, Christine Mehring, as well as Darby English, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Debbie Nelson, Claudia Brittenham, Solveig Nelson, Savannah Esquival, Kris Driggers, and those in the library at DesignMuseum Danmark, especially Anja Lollesgaard. Fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, and The Lois Roth Endowment Fund afforded me the opportunity to carry out the research for this essay.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For images of these chairs, see http://morphology.dk/chairs.html/.
2. That Shaker furniture influenced mid-century Danish furniture is already well established; e.g. Danish Foreign Ministry (Citation1977); Becksvoort (Citation2000, 19–21); and Olesen (Citation2014, 58, 99).
3. The furniture’s significance is tied to the culture of the group that made it. The Shaker sect, formally called the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, was formed as a Quaker offshoot in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, before relocating to the United States in the 1770s. By 1779, Shaker immigrants, led by Ann Lee, had purchased land outside of Albany, New York, and there constituted themselves as a society codified by a shared commitment to community, celibacy, and confession of sin. In Shaker doctrine, individuals were encouraged to efface personal interest in favor of the community, giving according to one’s abilities and taking only according to need. Such community was made manifest by the “families’ – relatively self-sufficient groups of thirty to one hundred men and women who lived together under the same roof – that organized Shaker settlements.
Since celibacy serves as a foundational principle of the Shaker faith, the religious community could be maintained only through conversion and by the mid-twentieth century, membership was dwindling and Shaker communities expiring. But the marginal group’s commitment to simplicity, practicality, and communal organization that was based in faith and so free of politics (i.e. communism) was increasingly viewed as “authentically American” (Andrews and Andrews Citation1966, xi).
4. At mid-century, the terms “design” and “designer” was not often used. Rather, furniture was called by the Danish word møbelkunst, directly translated as “furniture art", and those who designed it were, depending on their training, known as møbel arkitekts. This title was reserved for those who had studied at The Royal Academy School of Architecture. Despite this historical distinction in terminology, throughout this article I use the terms “design” and “designer". For the most part, I employ them colloquially rather than interpretively.
5. Notably, Wanscher illustrated his discussion of Shaker furniture with a photograph and an architectural drawing of the Mount Lebanon rocker. These are illustrated in Figure .
6. Such efforts extended earlier ones from the 1910s and 1920s. For more on this, see, for instance, Corn (Citation1999, 317–27).
7. In 1935, the Whitney Museum of American Art had organized Shaker Handicraft, a small, month-long exhibition of Shaker furnishings. Though it preceded both the Index and the publication of the Andrews’ book, the Whitney exhibition had far less of a national, let alone international, impact than either of the subsequent projects.
8. Arts reporter Ruth Green Harris echoed this in a New York Times article about the Index. She wrote that Shaker “stood for cleanliness, honesty and frugality. […] Few folk arts serve so well as an example to contemporary designers” (Harris Citation1939).
9. Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius had been published in 1936, a year prior to the Andrews’ book.
10. When exhibited at the 1942 cabinetmakers’ exhibition, however, the Mogensen-designed bed was tucked tightly into a corner, so rendering its wheels inert.
11. Juhl affirmed the importance of Shaker in Hjemmets Indretning, his popular book on modern home décor (Juhl Citation1954, 19). And in both the Danish- and English-language versions of his essential mid-century monograph of furniture history, which culminates in the rather anachronistic rise of Danish design, Ole Wanscher, Denmark’s premier design historian at mid-century, echoes Juhl’s claim (Wanscher Citation1961; Citation1966, 396).
12. In her essay on the Index, Virginia Tuttle Clayton, quoting historian Michael Kammen, refers to the Index as “an historically based public culture” (Clayton Citation2002, 1).
13. Marilyn F. Friedman has argued that department store exhibitions were fundamental in introducing a broad public to modern design and “gave commercial credibility to the modern movement” (Friedman Citation2003, 5).
14. The twentieth-century spread of Shaker into fine art and popular cultures in both the United States and Britain is well documented in Bowe and Richmond (Citation2007).
15. A 1959 article in Interiors magazine echoed this sentiment. “Today there is a large-scale interest, not to say preoccupation, with ‘the better life’” (156), the magazine explained. But, quoting a July 1959 piece in Fortune magazine, the article went on to say that “The American housewife wants furniture in good taste […] but does not know for sure what good taste in furniture is.’”
16. I borrow the term “puerile” from French painter André Villeboeuf describing postwar American painting: “Here is painting justly styled ‘International’ without origin, without taste; marked alone by an originality that accentuates the indecency of its arrogance, the puerility of its conceit” (Villeboeuf quoted in Guilbaut Citation1985, 43). Meanwhile, the term barren is Cahill’s: “Up to recent years most Americans have had something of an inferiority complex about American art. Many of them have been far too ready to say that it has been rather barren; that the paths of American art in the past have been few” (Cahill Citation1937, 3).
17. In a 1941 address, Holger Cahill attributed the success of the Index to the fact that the “common man” seemed “to recognize that these arts fit very closely into the context of our democratic life” (Cahill quoted in Clayton 2002, 4).
18. Abstract Expressionism’s role in promoting American freedom and values overseas is, at this point, well known. In companion essays published in Artforum in the early 1970s, critics Eva Cockcroft and Max Kozloff showed how the US government formalized a propaganda program abroad through a surge of cultural diplomacy initiatives that highlighted Abstract Expressionism. The heroism of American painting could be found in its demonstration of radical individuality. Only under democracy, these large canvases were shown to say, was such expression possible. Serge Guilbaut’s landmark book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983) advanced these revelations to demonstrate how postwar American painters developed their mode of pictorial production in tandem with a new ideology of political apoliticism, and produced a style that was neither left nor right, but simultaneously liberated and liberating (Cockcroft Citation1974, 39–42; Kozloff Citation1973, 43–54; Guilbaut Citation1985).
19. For more on this problem of the relationship between individual and community, especially nation, at mid-century, see Turner (Citation2013, 39–76).
20. My understanding of Potter’s ideas is deeply indebted to and paraphrases Turner (Citation2013, 218–20).
21. This idea of a popular craft knowledge in Scandinavia was a common refrain: “The Scandinavian lives out of a handmade tradition", declared House Beautiful magazine (Citation1959, 91), for instance.
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Maggie Taft
Dr Maggie Taft is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry at Washington University in St. Louis.