Josef Frank
Making Swedish Modern
By Christopher Long
One of the most remarkable displays at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was a small space in the Swedish pavilion. It featured an array of furnishings and other decorative objects produced by the Svenskt Tenn company in Stockholm, at the time one of the leading outlets for new design in Scandinavia. The clean lines and bright colors captivated visitors, many of whom realized that they were witnessing something entirely new: a design idiom that was modern and up-to-date, yet also comfortable, relaxed and unpretentious.
Swedish Modern design had first come to international notice two years before, at the Paris Exposition Internationale. Almost overnight, American manufacturers, from Conant-Ball and Dunbar to Heywood-Wakefield and the Michigan Seating Company, picked up the new aesthetic and began offering their own “Swedish Modern” pieces. Within a short time, the look of Swedish Modern had spread across the country, and articles appeared in most of the country’s leading popular home magazines offering advice on how to reproduce the look. The idea of a “mitigated” modernism would in fact continue for some years, influencing American design well into the 1960s.
What few Americans knew at the time was that the new style was not the creation of a native Swedish designer, but the Viennese-born Josef Frank, who had moved to Stockholm only a few years before. Frank had begun to develop the principles of his revolutionary aesthetic more than a decade and half earlier, and he had brought the basic ideas with him when he arrived in 1933 to become the chief designer at Svenskt Tenn. Although he would develop and refine his ideas over the next 20 years, the seeds of Swedish Modern had been planted in far off Central Europe.
Josef Frank was born in 1885, the son of a well-to-do Viennese industrialist and textile wholesaler. He had studied architecture at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute, receiving his degree in 1910. In the years just prior to World War I, he formed a partnership with two other recent graduates, Oskar Strnad and Oskar Wlach. The three architects specialized in single-family houses and interiors, drawing on both the English Arts and Crafts movement and the contemporary Viennese Secessionist style.
After the war, Frank continued his partnership with Wlach, designing housing projects for the Vienna municipal authorities and a handful of private villas. The focus of Frank’s efforts, however, moved increasingly toward interior design. In 1925, he and Wlach set up a home furnishings company, Haus & Garten (House and Garden), modeled on Morris and Company, William Morris’s shop in London and Josef Hoffmann’s Wiener Werkstätte.
Founded in 1861, Morris and Company was the first retail store for modern
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