collaborations with architects and designers on furniture for hotels, restaurants and luxury liners. By the late 1930s, Artifort had opened a showroom in Amsterdam.
World War II brought another difficult period with shortages of materials, labor and capital. After the war, competition arose from furniture companies in Scandinavia, which had escaped the destruction that had crippled the rest of Europe, Holland included, and were able quickly to resume production and the worldwide export of their popular modern-style wood furniture. Because of continuing supply problems, Artifort would not resume full production until 1950.
In 1948, Harry Wagemans, Henricus’s son, succeeded his father as managing director. He soon decided that, to compete with the Scandinavians, Artifort would have to embrace modern design. In 1951, he began producing modern pieces under license from the Swedish furniture brand Dux and he encouraged Theo Ruth to try designing in the new modern style; in 1952, Artifort introduced his upholstered armless Congo lounge chair, with graceful interlocking, biomorphic wooden legs. Wagemans there brought in a local modernist, the functionalist architect Gerrit Rietveld, a major figure in the De Stijl movement, who created a pair of armchairs — the only upholstered pieces he ever designed — in 1957. These were exhibited at the Dutch pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958.

That same year, Wagemans hired Kho Liang Ie as Artifort’s creative director. Born of Chinese descent in the former Dutch colony of Java, he had arrived in Amsterdam in 1949 to study design at the School for Applied Arts (now the Rietveld Academy). He worked after graduation at the Good Living (Goed Wonen) Foundation, a collective that tried to influence the direction of Dutch design after the war, promoting inexpensive, functional furniture. He convinced Wagemans that Artifort should design its own modern collection, rather than rely on Dux.

Liang Ie is remembered today primarily for his innovative 1962 interior design for the passenger terminal of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport; it was widely praised as a calming and humane environment for stress-prone travelers. But his work at Artifort was also profoundly influential for the development of postwar European furniture design. “He had a wonderfully full and lively imagination,” says Harcourt. “His was the moving force behind the selection of designs and designers used by Artifort and he had an enthusiastic audience in Harry Wagemans, who looked to designers to tell him what they should be making. Kho had a vision of what the company could be and went about realizing it in a quiet ordered manner tempered with a touch of Oriental inscrutability.” Liang Ie’s own notable designs for Artifort were clean-lined sofas and lounge chairs; his C 683 sofa from 1968 is still in production today.

Drawing on his contacts in the design world, Liang Ie organized an international furniture show in 1958 in Artifort’s showroom in Maastricht in hopes of discovering young talent for a new modern collection. Among the designers from across Europe who came and exhibited designs, was Pierre Paulin, who brought his 1954 Oyster chair and ottoman, which had initially been marketed — unsuccessfully — through Thonet. Bearing a passing resemblance to Saarinen’s Womb chair, the chair has the angular fullness of an oyster shell, its deeply cupped upholstered seat, constructed of foam-covered plywood, slung into a delicate polished steel frame.

Paulin, who had trained as a ceramist and sculptor, had traveled for several months around Scandinavia in 1950 at the age of 23. “I discovered modernity there,” he says. He visited Rovaniemi, in Lapland, where Finnish architect Alvar Aalto had been carrying out designs and urban planning since the 1920s, as well as Sweden. He was especially taken with the Swedish furniture he saw at Nordiska Companiet, the famous Stockholm department store founded in 1902. “It was wood furniture, of good quality for young couples and people of modest means,” he recalls. “They had a great advance on the Europeans.” He returned to Paris determined to become a designer.

There, he discovered the furniture of Knoll and Herman Miller, which was just starting to be exported to France. “I’ve always thought that Ray and Charles Eames were the greatest designers of the 20th century,” he says. “They made things that were very elegant, yet simple — products for mass production without pretense, and very beautiful. Eames discovered plywood and polyester and from these materials