Midcentury Modern Furniture Owes Its Popularity to the Welfare State

The first televisedpresidential debate, in 1960, began with both candidates sitting before approachingtheir respective podiums. Nixon was memorably not telegenic: sweaty anduncomfortable. On the chair next to him, Kennedy, with his legs crossed,appears relaxed, youthful, and handsome. In the intervening 60 years, we havecome to think of JFK winning the debate by knowing how to play to the camera.But maybe the chairs also helped: They were Danish.

In fact, they wereHans Wegner's famed round chairs:the ultimate symbol of midcentury sophistication. The chair was spartan andsimple—one big curve that could easily be picked up and moved (the back was anatural handle), like many other streamlined Danish products. The design was aptfor postwar America: democratic looking in its simplicity and use of naturalproducts but, without bulk and ornamentation, a sign of the future in whichform follows function. As one magazine writer from the time described Danishfurniture: It was "human and warm" unlike the "totalitarian" aesthetic putforth by International Style.

The Wegner chair isone of two pieces that Maggie Taft considers in her new book The Chieftain and the Chair: The Rise ofDanish Design in Postwar America. The other is the Chieftain chair designed by FinnJuhl. Together, the two seem to capture two different forms of aspiration. Whilethe round chair is understated and unassuming, the Chieftain, as the namesuggests, is the boss's chair for relaxing: large, sunk deep down to the floor,and featuring curved black leather arm pads on the horizontal rests that form aright angle with the back of the chair. Thin teak wood diagonals support thelarge leather seat creating what Taft calls "a floating effect." The two chairswere also created by very different men: Juhl was an architect with a coveteddegree from the Royal Danish Academy and a Dean at a local college. Wegnerapprenticed as a cabinetmaker before making his way to Copenhagen to be adesigner; he had more in common with the artisans who made the chairs than withthe illustrious architects who taught industrial design.

The most famous Scandi furniture now comes in flat packs, bought cheaplywith a stop-off to the cafeteria for a helping of frozen meatballs withlingonberry jam. But the original appeal of Danish furniture was deeper: Itpromised craftsmanship at a time of ramped-up assembly line production and thepared-down aesthetic of natural wood when the space age look of new materialswas ascendant. As Taft shows, these qualities were closely linked to Danishpolitical culture in the postwar years—to its progressive thinking, vibrantdemocratic principles, and above all its emerging welfare state.

American consumers hadbegun to take an interest in Danish designers as early as the 1920s. TheBrooklyn Museum showed Danish art and interior design in 1929 and Copenhagenfurniture makers were involved in the 1939 World's Fair in New York. But it wasafter World War II that Danish furniture really became popular in the United States. Themarket for high-end furniture was somewhat limited in Europe, where countriesravaged and depleted by war were slowly building up from the rubble. Danes, andother Scandinavian furniture retailers, sensed an opportunity in the U.S., wheredisposable income flowed more freely. Postwar America was hungry for couches,chairs, tables, and bureaus to stick inside the many Levittown-likedevelopments springing up.

Most of the furnitureconformed to the principles on display in MoMA's1949 competition for low-cost furniture design. But wealthier buyers also beganto collect pieces to outfit modernist homes. Taft uses the examples of MarcelBreuer and Mies van der Rohe houses: International Style homes with angularlines and spartan interiors, where the owners set off this severity with thewarmth of Danish furniture. While the Danish chairs are considered part of midcentury modernism, they are at odds with much of the aesthetic: They are simple but notspare, homey rather than industrial, and deriving from nature unlike theplastics, steel, or concrete used in modernist or brutalist architecture. Theywere a comfier addition to the slightly sterile and cavernous interiors ofmodernist houses.

While some of thefurniture went to affluent residences, a large portion also ended up in poshrestaurants and corporate headquarters, custom-built by noted architects. Oftenthis purchasing was a minor act of rebellion against the grandiose rigidness ofmodernist design and a desire to have something natural seeming in otherwisestreamlined spaces. A 1947 Danish government film hyping the crafts economyquoted Finn Juhl: "Furnitureshould be so made that you get the urge to feel the wood … that warm andliving character that causes one's fingers to tingle." As life became moreregimented and a sense of bureaucratic ennui set in, even for the successfulnew white-collar workers living the life of a John Updike novel, furniture thatlooked natural and timeless was a relief from a world galloping into the SpaceAge.

Why did Americans turnto Scandinavian designers specifically? Economic conditions in Scandinaviancountries were ripe for a flowering in design: They had excellent art schools, astrong craft tradition, well-paid specialist production, and a welfare statewilling to subsidize some areas of manufacturing. As well as, less admirably, apseudo-colonial relationship with Thailand that guaranteed cheap teak (until itwas terminated in 1960). While Denmark was not known as a major colonialplayer, except perhaps to people from Greenland, its global influence provided uniquematerials for high-quality furniture.

Praise of Danishdesign mounted quickly in the U.S. through exhibitions, magazine articles, andword-of-mouth. Taft relates how Wegner was approached by a members-only club inChicago in 1949 hoping to acquire 400 chairs, a number far beyond the capacityof the Copenhagen workshop that produced them. Danish chairs became a braggingright with devotees memorizing the shapes and mentally cataloging the availablecolors of upholstery. The appetite for Scandi furniture was so voracious thatknock-offs proliferated. Genuine producers began affixing metal plates, stamps,and brands to the underside of their furniture. One would not be surprised tosee their dinner guest surreptitiously peering under the Chieftain looking forwhere the wood had been marked by a hot iron in the Danish workshop.

The heyday of artisanfurniture, however, was brief. Keeping production in Denmark, or even inScandinavia, did not last long. In 1951, Juhl began designing for Baker, afurniture company from Michigan; the idea was to sell his designs to a largermass market by scaling-up production. Yet it was never clear how the level ofquality could be maintained outside of the Scandinavian welfare state with itsunique compromises between government, industry, and labor. In an American massmarket, it would be difficult to make elegant joinery using Fordist productiontechniques (and to pay artisan wages to assembly line workers). As the scale ofproduction increased, it was more difficult to maintain the myth of "Nordicnaturalness" and wood forms that represented a closeness to nature. In fact,even the teak was being supplanted by razor-thin slices of rosewood pasted ontofurniture facades.

Meanwhile, looselegal protections for furniture design meant that fakes and copiesproliferated. Well-heeled tourists in Copenhagen could visit the immensefurniture showroom Den Permanente near the central station to see authenticJuhls and Wegners, but they could also saunter over to Tidens Møbler, a storethat "offered copies that looked nearly as good" at a steep markdown. "And whenexported to America, both the real thing and the copy could legitimately belabeled ‘Made in Denmark.’" Even more alarmingly, American companies weremaking fake Danish furniture of lesser quality and at lower prices. Some ofthese businesses still exist today because of their successful foray intomidcentury design.

At the same time, counterfeitingwas also responsible for a big part of the popularity of Danish furniture.Knock-off versions made design truly widely available. The imitation versions ofthe furniture were more accessible and also more global: Already in 1955 copieswere being made in Taiwan, Mexico, and Yugoslavia. Around the world, designerswere churning out "Danish" interior design.

Danish furniture makersspent the 1960s fighting for copyright recognition at home (granted byparliament in 1961) and in the U.S. (approved by the Federal Trade Commission in1968). But they were also conducting a battle over taste. Taft shows this wasoften due to cultural differences: Danes wanted furniture for lounge rooms,Americans wanted things to watch and store their TVs on. Danes had a history ofinteresting space-saving experimentation: designs included "multipurposefurnishings called forvandlingsmøbler" such as "a storage unit thatdoubled as a minibar or a two-seat sofa that converted into a daybed." But inincreasingly affluent suburban America the point was to fit out larger homes, not to economize.

By the Nixon-Kennedydebate of 1960, the heyday of Danish (and Scandinavian) design was coming to anend, and pieces from a golden era were already being collected and curated. Thesame year, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York featured the Arts of Denmark: Viking to Modernexhibition, which was both a celebration of cutting-edge design as well as atribute to the Scandi welfare state and its social goals that were bothgenerous yet not communist. The exhibition stressed the importance of artisansand small businesses rather than state-directed (or private) factories despitethe fact that this small-scale manufacturing was quickly becoming economicallyuntenable in Europe and America.

But the free markethad the last laugh: Most designers lost their niche businesses to knock-offswell before copyright protection came into effect. What happened then, a storynot told in the book, was the shift to the warehouse, flatpack furniture ofIKEA (from nearby Sweden). This trend demonstrated the demand fordisposable furniture, produced cheaply abroad, and bought in large suburban boxstores. Most people never had the money to buy a Chieftain chair, but thepared-down Ekenäset is $250 at IKEA.

Perhaps because of the IKEAization of the global furniture market, original midcentury pieces havegrown in popularity. They represent not just a different consumer ethic ofbuying something for life but also a belief in craftsmanship. They come from aworld in which furniture makers could still afford to live in Copenhagen,rather than cutting particle board and bagging screws in Binh Duong Province,Vietnam. Though most consumers may not be aware of it, these pieces were carvedout of the basics of social democracy, which brought together living wages, jobpermanence, and the sense of producing a meaningful product that will not bequickly torn apart and binned when moving day comes.

Of course, the appealmay not be all nostalgia. The fauxegalitarian nature of Scandinavian design, despite the fact that it was mostlypurchased by elites, is also perfectly suited to an age of hyperinequality.The chairs are exactly the tasteful expensive objects that look homespun andquotidian to those who have not seen their $5,000 (per chair) price tag. Noassembly required.

Max Holleran is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Melbourne and author of Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing.