from England for Svenskt Tenn because of the German blockade, began to print some of Frank’s earlier designs and asked him to produce others. By the end of 1945, he had churned out nearly 60 patterns. He based many of the designs, such as Vegetable Tree and Terrazzo, on illustrations from small inexpensive pocket guides to North American flora, fauna and minerals he had picked up in New York bookstores. In each case, Frank reconceived the natural forms, manipulating their scale, shapes and arrangement. The end result was a series of striking designs — bold, colorful, and strangely familiar, yet also modern. In the postwar years, Ericson had most of the patterns printed; they would become the most popular items at Svenskt Tenn, their sales far outstripping any of Frank’s other designs.

During his time in New York, Frank made one further breakthrough. For some time, he had been thinking about devising an aesthetic based on random or chance ordering. As early as 1938, he had produced a design for a cabinet-on-stand with a seemingly haphazard arrangement of drawers. Around the same time, he also designed several houses with curving spaces or unusual polygonal rooms. In the mid 1940s, he began to develop a consistent theory for his new modus, which he would eventually call “Accidentism.” In a manifesto he published in the Swedish journal Form in 1958, he defined his new style: “What we need is a much greater elasticity, not strict formal rules. Every human needs a certain degree of sentimentality to feel free. . . . What we need is variety and not stereotyped monumentality. No one feels comfortable in an order that has been forced upon him, even if it has been doused in a sauce of beauty. Therefore, what I suggest are not new rules and forms but a radically different attitude toward art. Away with universal styles, away with the equalization of art and industry, away with the whole system that has become popular under the name functionalism. This new architectural system . . . I would like to give a name in the manner that is currently fashionable. . . . I will call it Accidentism for the time being, and by that I mean that we should design our surroundings as if they originated by chance.”

Frank was not the only one at the time advocating such ideas. Jackson Pollock and John Cage also sought an art of no-order, no-structure and no-control. But