'Chieftain' Chair

Finn Juhl is today celebrated as a furniture designer and cultural figure who created the concept of ‘Danish Design’ and paved the way for the global rise of Danish furniture in the 1950s and 1960s. To integrate one of his central beliefs over the role and symbiosis of art and design Juhl first presented the current armchair alongside tribal art, weapons and utilitarian objects on his stand at the 1949 Copenhagen Cabinetmakers’ Guild Exhibition, held at the then Kunstindustrimuseet (now the Design Museum, Denmark). Juhl related that when the exhibition was opened, King Frederick IX of Denmark had tried the chair, and the designer was asked by a journalist if it should now be called ‘the King’s chair’, to which he had responded ‘you had better call it a chieftain’s chair’. The chair was the highlight of the exhibition, with one journalist writing ‘[the chair]…is so full of life that it seems to be almost quivering with vitality. It is as expensive and as delicate as a thoroughbred must be….’. Today, with the linear arrangement of the supports and legs contrasting with the curvaceous fluidity of the organic ‘floating’ back and seat, it is acclaimed as a key work of international mid-century modernism.

The design of this work dates from a key period in Juhl's work when, starting in the 1940s, he broke away from established Danish furniture tradition and designed a number of works that came to regenerate Danish furniture design and the current lot – the Chieftain chair – is the most emblematic of this new direction. His rise to further international recognition in the following decade came following the acclaim and five gold medals awarded to his work at the Milan Triennales through the 1950s, followed by his work as an interior designer, such as on the Trusteeship Council Chamber at the United Nations headquarters in New York. He also played a central role in driving the exhibition of Danish design internationally, assuring his position today as a pivotal figure in the development and originality of 20th century design.

Juhl was proudly independent. Unlike his contemporaries who exhibited at the Copenhagen Cabinetmaker’s Guild exhibitions – the
central platform of the Danish design industry – Juhl had neither been trained as a cabinetmaker and also had not studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and Design under Kaare Klint, and so did not feel bound by their conventions, and thus felt free to move away from the traditions of craftsmanship within furniture design. His freer design, where form was an expressive part of function, contrasted with the more stringent geometrically determined Klint style which had previously dominated mainstream taste. Most notably in his work he separated the seat and back from the bearing wooden frame, separating the constructive elements of a work which follows Gerrit Rietveld’s red /blue chair of 1917 and Elling sideboard, designed 1919 (as seen in this catalogue) which also explore this theme. Juhl was attracted by this approach and felt it completely natural for the applied artist to seek inspiration from the fine art of his day, and not from the idioms of the past. Juhl disclosed the inspiration he had felt by modern sculpture’s analytical work with bodies in free and bound movement, as he found in contemporary work by Hans Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Giacometti and in the moving sculptures, mobiles, of Alexander Calder. His intense study with the possibilities of this reached its purest expression in his 1949 Chieftain Chair.