“The time has come to recognize that Kjærholm is one of the primary figures of the 20th century,” declared curator Michael Sheridan, at the opening of his exhibition, “Poul Kjærholm: Furniture Architect,” in June. Exploring the show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark—surrounded by designs that seemed startlingly contemporary—it was hard not to ponder a question Sheridan himself raised: “Why does this work, that in many cases was designed fifty years ago, still exert a certain power?”
The answer, as the exhibition makes clear, is that in his brief life, Kjærholm (1929–1980) managed quite a feat: He bridged one of design’s most persistent divides—the gulf between craft and industry—achieving a synthesis that, in its material expressiveness, clarity of conception and execution, and compelling sense of narrative, remains virtually unequaled.
It wasn’t easy. Apprenticed at 15 to a cabinetmaker in his hometown of Hjørring, Denmark, the designer embraced the craft-based traditions of 19th-century Danish woodworking. Yet when he began his studies at Copenhagen’s School of Arts and Crafts, Kjærholm—thanks to an industrial design class taught by the architect Jørn Utzon—found himself drawn to steel and the utopian potential of mass production. This culminated, in 1951, in his graduation project, the PK 25: a lounge chair made from a single piece of bent steel, its back and seat strung from flagline. The piece, which achieved the unity of fine cabinetry in an industrial material, galvanized the Danish design world—Sheridan calls it “radical”—and launched Kjærholm’s career.
Most designers would have stuck with what worked. For Kjærholm, however, the PK 25 marked the start of a difficult struggle, one that flowed from the designer’s nature. “He was more curious and studied more than the other furniture architects,” recalls his wife, Hanne—herself one of Denmark’s foremost architects—seated at Kjærholm’s worktable, in the classic home she created for them in 1961 in Rungsted Kyst on the Øresund coast. “Because he was not interested in money, or production. He was interested in trying experimental ideas.”
Experiment he did. For three years—first at the Fritz Hansen company, which hired him in 1952 to explore new materials, then as a freelance industrial designer—Kjærholm searched for a language that might reconcile his interests, producing a stream of projects, ranging from cast-concrete modular furniture to wood-and-steel chairs requiring careful assembly, that amounted to a bad case of the creative Hamlets: industrial production or håndværk? That was the question.
In 1955, Kjærholm was asked to design desks for the architecture school at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. By setting a pine work surface atop a ready-made steel base, Kjærholm experienced a breakthrough. For the ensuing 25 years, his furniture would combine natural and industrial materials, unified with workshop techniques that brought out the characteristics of each, and machine-made joinery handled with a cabinetmaker’s precision.
Much of this combination’s enduring vitality derives from its contradictions. Not only did Kjærholm treat steel in a craftsmanlike way, he contrasted it with woven cane, traditional leather detailing, and richly veined, matte-finished stone. “The furniture’s unity is sacred to me,” Kjærholm said; yet while his pieces are as seamless in their assembly as one of Hans Wegner’s finger-jointed wood chairs, the designer’s use of machine screws and O-rings to couple his components expresses their apartness even as it unites them.
Kjærholm’s relationship to architecture was also complex. He came of age as California’s Case Study program was influencing Danish residential design, nowhere more apparently than in Hanne’s modernist plan for their home. Kjærholm described this as “an order that is not oppressive” and observed that “I try to work together with modern architecture that seeks out this simple order.” Pointing out the pieces her husband designed to establish working, living, and dining areas in their house’s public room, Hanne says, “He wanted furniture to influence a room as part of a room—to make spaces that express the architecture.”
Yet Kjærholm’s designs, with their sculptural profiles and quality of what Sheridan calls “pure construction,” are architectural in their own right. Jørn Utzon captured this blend of deference and self-assertion when he observed, “A piece of Poul’s furniture is like an elegantly written character that gives the room in which it stands solidity and calm.”
“I lived with him, I never thought about it,” Hanne admits. “Only now, after all the discussion, can I see the difference between him and the others.” Indeed, Kjærholm’s undemonstrative ethos often belied his genius. He was, noted the architect Nils Fagerholt, “not curious in the usual or accepted way. He saw and sought only what he needed.” Apparently it was enough. “You look at other masterpieces from that period,” Sheridan says. “And they’re beautiful, but they look like they were designed in the 1950s. Kjærholm’s pieces don’t—they exist out of time.”
2 / His apprenticeship not only included coffin building but also placing the bodies in their new homes, after which the irrepressible artist painted pictures of the deceased.
3 / As a result of a childhood infection, one of Kjærholm’s legs was shorter than the other, resulting in a limp. “He could have been helped by a special shoe, but he wouldn’t do it,” Hanne recalls.
4 / In 1949, Kjærholm enrolled in Copenhagen’s School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied with furniture designer Hans Wegner.
5 / Kjærholm was influenced by Gerrit Rietveld, whose furniture used simple forms and structural elements to shape and defer to space, and Mies van der Rohe, for his use of steel and commitment to refining and perfecting essential furniture typologies.
6 / From 1953 through 1979, Kjærholm held various teaching positions, first at the School of Arts and Crafts, then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture.
7 / In 1955, Kjærholm partnered with furniture dealer E. Kold Christensen, who assembled a team of artisans to produce individual components, and encouraged the designer’s interest in assembly, as it enabled the work to be shipped in pieces. They remained in business until Kjærholm’s
death in 1980.
8 / Between 1953 and 1980, Kjærholm also designed some 25 exhibitions—characterized by the use of photomurals, simple architectural elements, and plants—that showcased his own work, Denmark’s applied arts, and modern photography.
9 / In 1965, Kjærholm was selected to design furniture for Washington’s Kennedy Center. Though his designs weren’t used, the commission rekindled his interest in wood; Kjærholm’s wood furnishings during the 1970s included theater seats for the Louisiana Museum’s concert hall.
10 / Despite his famous seriousness, Kjærholm “was very free and fun,” says Hanne. “He had a great sense of humor.”
