Finn Juhl exhibition

Please Sit down!Furniture and Drawings by Finn Juhl

Finn Juhl (1912 – 1989) was a Danish architect, interior and industrial designer. He was one of the leading figures of “Danish Design” in the 1940s and 1950s.

Finn Juhl - an artistic furniture designer

As a young man, Finn Juhl dreamt of becoming an art historian. His profound understanding of international contemporary art as well as historical art remained a key thread throughout his career. He became one of the leading furniture designers of the 20th century with a strong artistic touch. All throughout his life, he always emphasised the fact that he was a self-taught furniture maker. He studied urban architecture but never had the time to graduate. He only designed a couple of summer cottages and a bungalow, all characterized by radically modernist spatial sequences.Finn Juhl began his career as a furniture maker in the 1930s, and unlike his fellow designers who were trained in cabinetmaking, he was making heavy, upholstered furniture. From the beginning, his furniture stood out in stark contrast with the leading furniture professor Kaare Klint and his students’ rational, traditional and geometric design. Juhl did not favour the idea of simply continuing the line of tradition but also drew inspiration from other sources, particularly contemporary art. As a result, his furniture not only resembled sculptures by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Erik Thommesen but was often displayed alongside works by these artists.

An exponent of Danish organic modernism

Juhl’s furniture calls out and sparks admiration because of its light quality and sculptural elegance, which reached far beyond its own time. His organic and artistically inspired shapes made Juhl a main exponent of the organic variant of international modernism. His early furniture sculptures resembled giant mammals.In “Chieftain Chair”, his main creation from 1949, the organic and thinly padded points of contact, the seat and armrest, seem to be floating. The chair was adorned with organic details reminiscent of tools by indigenous peoples. This chair represents Finn Juhl’s groundbreaking work. Next to Hans J. Wegner’s contemporary furniture, this piece largely participated to the breakthrough of Danish design especially in the USA.The American avant-garde had no trouble grasping Juhl’s dynamic lines. After all, the USA was the country that had introduced streamline design in the 1930s. After the war, the American art elite continued European modernism and welcomed Juhl, partly because of his friendship with Edgar Kaufmann, head of the design department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Juhl was not only a key exponent of Danish Design abroad. In the 1950s, he was the architect behind several important travelling exhibitions about Danish design in the USA, and he also handled major interior design assignments abroad, including the Trusteeship Council Chamber at the UN Headquarters in New York.