Hans Wegner; NY Times obit (furniture designer)
Hyfler/Rosner
NY Times
David Colman
Hans Wegner Dies at 92; Danish Furniture Designer
Hans Wegner, whose Danish Modern furniture - most famously
his chairs - helped change the course of design history in
the 1950s and '60s by sanding modernism's sharp edges and
giving aesthetes a comfortable seat, died on Jan. 26 in
Copenhagen. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marianne Wegner, who
worked alongside her father for more than 20 years.
Mr. Wegner (pronounced VEG-ner in English and VAY-ner in
Danish) was one of a small group of Danish furniture
designers whose elegant but comfortable creations made
Danish Modern all the rage among cosmopolitan Americans of
the '50s and '60s.
He also earned a footnote in political history, when, in
1960, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F.
Kennedy were seated on Wegner chairs during the first
nationally televised presidential debate.
"He was one of what I think of as the humble giants of
20th-century design, those men who would probably shun the
term designer and prefer to call themselves cabinetmakers,"
said Paola Antonelli, the curator of architecture and design
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where many of Mr.
Wegner's chairs are not only on display but in use, in the
museum's several restaurants.
Describing the appeal of his furniture, she said, "First and
foremost, it's comfortable, and saying that it's comfortable
before saying it's beautiful is really high praise, because
the truth is that it's incredibly elegant."
Mr. Wegner rose to international prominence as one of a
handful of Danes who seized the design world's attention
with a fresh aesthetic of sculptural and organic modern
furniture. Others were Arne Jacobsen, Finn Juhl, Borge
Mogensen and Poul Kjaerholm.
Their works, often made in warm blond wood, domesticated the
cold chrome shine of the Bauhaus-influenced International
style. In the process, they found a way to dovetail the
words "Danish" and "modern" for the first time, joining
cabinetmaker-guild traditions of high craftsmanship, quality
and comfort with modernist principles of simplicity and
graphic beauty.
This unity was epitomized by Mr. Wegner's two best-known
chair designs, both introduced in late 1949. One was the
Wishbone chair, with a Y-shaped back split and a curved back
and armrest suggested by a child's Chinese chair he saw.
Sometimes called the Y-back, it is an understated work of
simplicity and comfort, its graceful shape hinting at both
East Asian design and modernist ideals. It is still made
today by the Danish firm Carl Hansen & Son.
His other 1949 success became known simply as the Chair, or
the Round Chair. (Mr. Wegner did not name his chairs,
letting manufacturers or customers name them as they liked,
leading to some confusion over the years.) The Chair is a
strikingly modern design, with a caned seat and a back and
armrests made of one continuous semicircle of wood. This was
the chair used in the Kennedy-Nixon debate.
Born in 1914, Hans Jorgen Wegner learned woodworking as a
boy, the son of a cobbler, in Tondern, in southern Denmark.
He was studying design in Copenhagen in 1938 when he was
hired by Mr. Jacobsen and Erik Moller to design furniture
for the town hall they were creating in Aarhus, Denmark.
Before the project was over, he met Inga Helbo, a secretary
in Mr. Jacobsen's office. They later married.
Once the Aarhus project was completed, Mr. Wegner started
his own design business, and by the mid-1940s he had created
chair designs for the Fritz Hansen and Johannes Hansen
furniture companies, including the Peacock chair, a smart
update of the Windsor chair.
Working out of a studio at his house, Mr. Wegner produced
hundreds of prototypes and had to be pressed to leave work
for family vacations. Asked what his other interests were,
his daughter Marianne, said with a laugh: "Apart from
furniture? None." Mr. Wegner's wife and another daughter,
Eva Wegner, also survive him.
By the late 1960s, the rage for Danish Modern had cooled in
the United States. But Mr. Wegner kept working, creating new
designs for another Danish company, P P Mobler. He retired
in the early 1990s, when Marianne, an architect, took over
his studio.
Over the last decade he was able to witness a surge of
renewed interest in his work. Mid-century Modern furniture
is again in high demand, according to spokesmen for P P
Mobler and Carl Hansen. What was a chic look a half-century
ago has today joined the pantheon of mainstream style,
perhaps a fitting tribute to a man who believed that a chair
should be made well enough to last at least 50 years.