Design byHugh Aldersey-Williams
A month ago in this magazine, Charles Jennings ("No place for a flashy red sports car", 17 May) drew a portrait of modern Denmark and a people marked, apparently, by their suspicion of material goodies. What does a designer do in such a country? Suffer along with the rest.
The nation's design expresses the "Jante law", the Danish version of the Japanese proverb saying that the nail which stands out shall be bashed into line. Things all seem to look the same. The favoured shape, recurring with Nabokovian persistence, is a long, low rectangle - a kind of sublime building block. Indeed, the Lego brick is its most obvious manifestation. But it is also there in the hi-fis of Bang & Olufsen and the central heating radiators made by Hudevad, smooth-faced superiors to the crinkle-cut ones that defile British living-rooms. Those vertiginous coffee pots you see at business meetings are cylindrical, not rectangular, but they have the same elongated profile. It's in the architecture, too, from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen, to Arne Jacobsen's St Catherine's College, Oxford.
Denmark has the clearest design identity of all European countries. Its products cannot fairly be lumped with Sweden's as "Scandinavian". (Swedish and Finnish design go better together, nestling like spoons in their preference for organic curves.) And Denmark is one of the few countries where famous designers' work is affordable and popular with ordinary people. Famous names? Jacobsen, though here thanks mainly to Lewis Morley's 1963 photograph of Christine Keeler sitting naked astride his "Ant Chair". Who else? The curators at the Design Museum tout Verner Panton, the subject of a current retrospective, as "Denmark's most famous and exciting designer". I suppose they are right. Denmark's other famous designers aren't thought exciting. And if it has other exciting designers, doubtless Jante law has kept them from becoming famous.
Panton died last year, hence this exhibition. But his senior, the comparatively neglected 85-year-old Hans Wegner, works on. Both Panton and Wegner spent apprenticeships working for Jacobsen, Wegner during the second world war, Panton a decade later. Wegner's prolific output is in the expected Danish tradition: scores of wooden chairs and other furniture designs distinguished by their quiet confidence - forthright, honest, reliable pieces, never pompous or lumbering, and sometimes with a lightness and wit. One of his best works is a three-legged chair of moulded plywood and tapering legs that touch the ground like a crab's. In the timeless way of Danish design, it is sometimes hard to tell which are the recent pieces and which are designs from the 1940s that have simply been in production ever since. In our restless search for superficial novelty, Wegner has rather slipped from the spotlight, his quiet eye and hand not really what the style pages want.
Panton was the rebel, Verner the ultra-Dane, transgressor of the Jante law. He was at his most exciting when he was asked to renovate the Kimigen-kroen (Come-again Inn) on the island of Funen 40 years ago. In place of tasteful natural tones and textures, he ordered that everything should be in colour - the same colour - even down to the tablecloths and waitresses' uniforms (imagine country pubs made over by Zandra Rhodes). After that he made his office not in Denmark but in Switzerland. Later buildings continued to test their users' tolerance for saturated colour, the Hamburg offices for Der Spiegel magazine done in 1969 providing a rare instance where he seems to have found the right client at the right time.
His "theory of colour" was built on that of Goethe and the Bauhaus painters. As a designer, however, Panton had more opportunity than they did to explore the mood-altering effects of colour-complementary after-images, synaesthetic association of hues with shapes or sounds, and other perceptual curiosities. Unlike the paintings of Josef Albers or the music of Aleksandr Scriabin, where you can always turn your gaze towards the ceiling, with Panton the ceiling got the treatment, too. It may be hard to live with, but it makes great exhibition material.
Working out of neutral Switzerland, with his strangely unplaceable name, Panton might not seem Danish at all. But his work, superficially so different from the run of Danish design with its crisp lines and interminable good taste, in fact distils its essence. There is the same need to control the environment, but raised to the nth degree; the same experimentation with materials and technologies, his not moulded plywood, but polyurethane foam, fibreglass and Perspex. He does ergonomics as well as the next Scandinavian; it's just that the results don't show it because there's so much else going on. His best-known design is the cantilevered stacking chair that bears his name. Made from a single piece of glass fibre, it is like a sculpture of a brushstroke. As for his colours, they are same as those of Lego bricks.
"Verner Panton: light and colour" is at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 from 17 June until 10 October 1999
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