Danish fancies
THE KNIGHT OF GLYN
The Art of Furniture Ole Wanscher, translated by David Hohnen (Allen and Unwin £6) We are currently blessed with an exhibition, Two Centuries of Danish Design,' which opened this week at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It starts logically with those splen- didly chilly names of Danish neo-classicism, Abildgaard, Kobke and Dreyer, though the show includes no sculpture, so sadly Thorvald- son is not of their company. The neo-classic is followed by the Danish Art Nouveau or Jugendstil (cheers) but next we have what the handout breathlessly calls 'a wide range of Danish applied art from the beginning of the modern period to the late 1920s up to the pre- sent day.' Here's the crunch.
Good, honest, functional, clean-limbed, re- spectable Danish modern again, on view in London to do battle with perspex, blow-up Habitat and neo-Regency. Why is it that one groans to oneself at the very mention of it all? Ole Wanscher's The Art of Furniture, newly translated from the Danish, possibly suggests some of the reasons why, Wanscher is Profes- sor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and an extremely well-known de- signer of furniture himself; indeed he is repre- sented in the exhibition, together with such giants of Danish design as Professor Kaare Klint and other workers in the different media of ceramics, glass and metal.
Professor Wanscher's book is just what one would expect—a solid and highly methodical survey of 5,000 years of furniture, Egypt to Eames or, reversely, Fin Juhl to faldstool. This may sound a reasonable addition to put on the shelf beside Feulner and World Furniture, but somehow all one's tiresome prejudices about Danish design come tumbling out-after reading this deadpan, humourless, maddeningly com- petent book. Its personality is gloomily neat and precise from the marginal headings to the basic theme that runs through the whole—a eulogy of all thit is sober, utilitarian and rational in de- sign. The photographs are clear though politely muted, as if in smug deference to jazzier volumes, and all the layout smacks of 1937 rather than 1967. Many of these photographs are accompanied by immaculate scale drawings of some of the pieces showing their front, side and plan but, alas, no indication of construction. The choice of illustrations plays down anything that could be considered gimcrack, ephemeral or off-beat, and all is loaded down towards sober restraint.
To be more specific, when he comes to that sensational rococo Gaudreau/Caffieri mounted commode made for Versailles in 1739 now in the Wallace Collection, Professor Wanscher, after muttering about 'almost barbaric mag- nificence and weight,' disparagingly calls it 'a mediaeval iron-bound chest in court dress.' Surely the two have nothing in common, except the fact that they were both used to put things in. He also oddly considers the French rococo more asymmetrically subdued than Gothic orna- ment, quoting a lock on a chest in Elsinore (p. 124), and summoning up further evidence from another Catalonian example (p. 116), which is speciously described as asymmetrical because when you open its perfectly balanced door different tracery appears inside! Later, during a discussion of English furniture of the turn of the seventeenth century, he considers that 'it would appear to have been related to ships, carriages and riding equipment.'
Perhaps this is a muddled translation, but the whole book is shot through with paeans for common sense, utility, sound and solid construc- tion, and the puritan way of life. Professor Wanscher, it could be guessed, profoundly ad- mires the Windsor chair as a product of eigh- teenth century rationalism. One cannot help feeling that he is more at home with Greenland deal stools, designed for fishing on ice, than with the dangerously unfolksy glories of the baroque, which last meets with little sympathy.
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