Nanna Ditzel (Guardian)
Hyfler/Rosner
Modernist designer who created iconic Danish style objects
Penny Sparke
Friday June 24, 2005
Guardian
A leading member of the generation of designers who created
the postwar Danish modern movement, Nanna Ditzel, has died
in Copenhagen at the age of 81. Remarkable, above all else,
for being a woman in the male-dominated world of industrial
design, from the mid-1940s she created - with her husband
Jorgen, until his death in 1961, and subsequently on her
own - numerous iconic design objects.
The Ditzels helped to make Denmark renowned for its
production of innovative accessories - in furniture,
interiors, ceramics, textiles and jewellery, in particular.
No single piece expressed this spirit more than their 1959
wicker egg chair, which, suspended by a chain from the
ceiling, was frequently featured in fashion and interior
magazines. Its gravity- resistant form suggested a liberated
lifestyle, free from earth-bound anxieties, and it was
embraced by an idealistic generation of stylish young people
in the 1960s.
From the early 20th century, Danish modernism had been
committed to the humanistic principles underpinning craft
materials and manufacture and, after the second world war,
to equipping small living spaces with flexible furnishings.
In their work, the Ditzels embraced that same idealism and
moved it on into a new era.
Nanna Ditzel had an impeccable Danish modern pedigree. Born
in Copenhagen, she began her working life as an apprentice
cabinet-maker and trained as a furniture maker under the
leading craftsman of the inter-war years, Kaare Klint, at
the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, and subsequently
at the School of Arts and Crafts. Her career blossomed while
she was still a student and she began exhibiting at the
influential annual Cabinetmakers' Guild exhibitions in the
Danish capital.
She met her husband, an upholstery specialist, in 1943, and
they set up a design studio together in 1946, the year of
Nanna's graduation. The late 1940s and 1950s saw the couple
work together on furniture pieces and interior environments.
The strikingly novel, split-level floor seating and cushions
they created quickly became their trademark. In 1952, they
designed a series of children's furniture items (they had
three daughters themselves), a theme that was to re-emerge
in Nanna's career with the creation of Toadstool, a
furniture piece which could be used both as a stool and a
table.
Although modern in style - and inspired by the possibilities
offered by new materials and production techniques - the
Ditzel designs were, above all, sensitive to the
requirements of comfort and liveability. The award of silver
medals at the influential Milan triennales of 1951, 1954 and
1957 was followed by a gold medal at the 1960 event.
In 1956, they began a fruitful collaboration with the Danish
jewellery company, Georg Jensen. The organic shapes of the
innovative pieces they created were inspired by the natural
world - Nanna likened one design to "the ripples of waves".
After Jorgen's death, Nanna added to her clients the Danish
textile companies Kvadrat and Unika-Voev, for whom she
created a showroom.
In 1968, her life changed dramatically when she married a
German businessman, Kurt Heide, and moved to Hampstead,
north London, where she opened the furniture studio and
showroom Interspace, which became an important forum for
discussions about modern furniture design. Her 18 years in
London were recognised when she was made an honourable royal
designer for industry in 1996.
After the death of her second husband, Nanna went back to
Copenhagen in 1986. There, she continued, until a few months
before her death, to design innovative furniture pieces
which combined her apprenticeship within early postwar
Danish modernism and a level of sophistication which came
from having worked in the international arena for several
decades.
Her op-art patterned Bench for Two, of 1989, for instance
brought together a sense of economy learned from equipping
the minimal spaces of the 1950s with pop imagery absorbed
from the 1960s. The sleek sofas and tables she created in
the early 2000s demonstrated her awareness of the elegant
designs that had emerged from Italy in the 1970s and 80s but
still had a certain Danishness about them.
In 1993, Nanna had a one-woman exhibition in Milan, while
1996 and 1997 saw her designs exhibited in Manchester,
Glasgow, Iceland and London. In 1998, she was awarded the
lifelong artist's grant by the Danish ministry of culture
and a book of her work, Motion And Beauty, was published.
She is survived by her three daughters.
· Nanna Ditzel, designer, born October 6 1923; died June 17
2005