IF FRENCH MODERNISM IS RATIONAL, Italian modernism sensual, German modernism ideological, and Danish modernism comfortable, what’s American modernism? I’d say it’s Danish. That’s because of Jens Risom, the Danish-born and -trained designer who, twenty-three years old on the eve of World War II, boarded a freighter bound for New York. There, according to Vicky Lowry in Jens Risom: A Seat at the Table, the first monograph on his work, the young man “quickly discovered that there wasn’t really any interesting contemporary American furniture to study and learn from”—an exaggeration, maybe, but it’s true enough that Risom found an open field. Success came quickly: within a few years of his arrival, he was collaborating with the likes of Edward Durell Stone, Georg Jensen, and an energetic entrepreneur who’d just recently founded his own furniture company, Hans Knoll; he was producing everything from children’s playrooms to US Navy mess halls. But when Risom was drafted, Knoll hired a young Bauhaus-trained designer, Florence Schust, who soon became Florence Knoll. For her, Risom’s designs were “too romantic and didn’t quite fit in with my ideas.” Back from the army, Risom could see which way the wind was blowing; he had started his own company by the time he was thirty. Now, his designs became even more ubiquitous, finding space everywhere from middle-class homes to the White House to the offices of Playboy magazine and Walt Disney. Richard Avedon shot his ad campaign. Risom became synonymous with what we now know as midcentury modern. His modernism was not industrial in style but organic; he was in love with wood: “a live texture, a depth texture, and a certain visual security . . . which a piece of wood can give.” Ostentation and austerity were equally alien to him. Ease, informality, and immaculate construction were key—an unpretentious sophistication that still seems fresh. An early client asked for a “modern house which will still be modern in 60 years,” and Risom’s idea of how to live and work still does feel modern. His 1942 lounge chair for Knoll seems to mix relaxation with formal economy—and with the other kind of economy too, since it used straps made from surplus parachute webbing as upholstery. It’s telling of Risom’s taste for practicality that for his most significant architectural project, his summer house on Block Island, he customized a prefab kit house. Along with an inventory of Risom’s production—vast, since he lived to a hundred and remained productive nearly to the end—as well as a section focusing on the many pieces still in production, this compendium offers an evocative assemblage of drawings and loads of period imagery that appeals to nostalgia for the Mad Men era. But Risom’s implicitly ecological bent toward inventively reusing and adapting available materials has lessons for the future, too.
