The things that artists choose to collect and live with have always fascinated me. So at a panel discussion last fall about Judd Furniture, a new book discussing the minimalist’s prolific functional art practice, something his daughter Rainer said really stuck with me: Her father had a thing for Swedish antiques. A pine Swedish serving table sat on the second floor of his famous Spring Street home in New York City; early-20th-century pieces filled the Cobb House at the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas. And if you look at the practical, streamlined elegance that characterizes furniture from this time and place, it makes sense that Judd, an artist who valued the pure, pared-down essence of things, quite liked them.
Judd, of course, was ahead of the curve. But lately Swedish design—particularly from the first half of the 20th century—has been on our radar, big time. Whether in homes, where rustic wood pieces by Axel Einar Hjorth or svelte yet approachable Josef Frank stunners have become hot design trophies, or on the auction block, where such furnishings go for six figures, design from this period has quietly crept back in style.
“There’s a simplicity and a directness to the ideas from this period that resonates with us,” says AD100 interior designer Giancarlo Valle, who has long incorporated Swedish antiques into his projects (in his own Connecticut country house, for example), and now sells them at Casa Valle, the new gallery space he runs with his wife, Jane Keltner de Valle. Here, Axel Einar Hjorth’s 1930 pine Utö dining chairs sit with 1950s Josef Frank lamps and a pair of Ivar Johnsson cast-iron garden urns from 1919. Those urns are from the Swedish Grace movement, the nation’s slightly more romantic answer to contemporaneous Art Deco which offered a more humanistic approach to the mechanized style taking root across Europe. Interior designer and architect Lee Mindel calls the period “a socio-political response to a world in turmoil after the First World War.” Designs from this period, which blended streamlined forms with neoclassical motifs, are on view through January 31 at Mindel’s Galerie56 in New York, a collaboration with Swedish purveyor Jackson Design. Pieces like Anna Petrus’s monumental cast-iron and granite table, originally shown at The Met’s 1927 survey, “Swedish Contemporary Decorative Arts,” and Gunnar Asplund’s Senna Lounge Chair, designed for the 1925 Paris World Fair show, prove, in Mindel’s words, that “simple materials, a celebration of democratic principles, and elegant use of materials are universal.”
Pieces by the likes of Gunnar Asplund and Axel Einar Hjorth represented Sweden on the global stage, slowly evolving into a style that, Phillips’s senior specialist Sofia Sayn-Wittgenstein calls “balanced modernist elegance with a human-centric touch.” At the center of the movement were Josef Frank and Estrid Ericson, founders of the Stockholm emporium Svenskt Tenn, which celebrated its centennial last year with a retrospective exhibition at Liljevalchs Konsthall. At auction, Sayn-Wittgenstein says, “We’ve witnessed exceptional results in recent years for works by Sweden’s most celebrated figures.” A rare 1941 Josef Frank cabinet, covered in images of monkeys, went for a whopping $347,600, while a Märta Måås-Fjetterström rug recently reached $206,159. “These results further underscore the global appreciation for Swedish craftsmanship and design,” she notes.
That idea has long been at the core of New York gallery Hostler Burrows’s program, which has specialized in dealing vintage and antique Scandinavian pieces since opening in 1998. When they first opened, Danish design was coming into vogue, with collector interest around works by Finn Juhl, Arne Jacobsen, and Hans Wegner. “Over time, as the market for works by those iconic names intensified, we saw a growing interest from collectors in our Swedish material,” Kim Hostler explains. “Sweden, in contrast, offered a wealth of small cabinetmakers throughout the early 20th century who were designing stylish, comfortable furniture in very limited production, often as commissions for specific clients. These types of pieces have an enduring appeal and mix beautifully with a diverse range of both contemporary and vintage design.”
