Hans J. Wegner - Editions, Photographs and Design Hong Kong Thursday, December 12, 2024 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Private collection, Denmark
    Klassik, Copenhagen
    Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2013

  • Literature

    Af Jørn Rubow, 'Udstillingen i Kunstindustrimuseet', Nyt Tidsskrift For Kunstindustri, no. 1, January 1944, p. 90
    Ingvar Bergström, 'Danskt i Röhsska Konstslöjdmuseet', Nyt Tidsskrift For Kunstindustri, no. 10, October 1945, p. 119
    Johan Møller Nielsen, Wegner: En Dansk Møbelkunstner, Copenhagen, 1965, p. 36
    Jens Bernsen, Hans J. Wegner: Om Design, exh. cat., Dansk Design Center, Copenhagen, 1995, pp. 17, 26, 27, 68
    Christian Holmsted Olesen, Wegner: Just One Good Chair, exh. cat., Design Museum Denmark, Copenhagen, 2014, pp. 114, 121, 122

  • Catalogue Essay

    Hans Wegner is considered one of the most important and prolific modernists who designed over 500 chairs. In 1943, Wegner designed this now-iconic 'China' chair which derived from an eighteenth-century imperial Chinese precedent, a photograph of which Wegner had encountered in the pages of Ole Wanscher's 1932 book, Types of Furniture, in Aarhus library. In looking to Chinese arts and crafts as models for contemporary furniture in the West, Wegner followed a trend taken up by Arne Jacobsen and other exhibitors at the Copenhagen Cabinetmaker's Guild exhibition already in the early 1930s, and before then by European craftsmen as early as the second half of the seventeenth-century. What set Wegner's designs apart from those of his predecessors was isolation of the key structural components of the Chinese model, the rounded top rail with continuous arms, and the strip-form back support, in a simplified, essentialised modernist design, whose formal details are at once decorative and naturally constructive. Such was the basis of the present 'China' chair model no. 4283, manufactured by Fritz Hansen between 1944 and 1960, which first gained critical acclaim at the 1944 Spring Exhibition of the School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen.

Property from the Collection of Kai-Yin Lo

51

'China' armchair, model no. 4283

designed 1944, produced 1956
Cherry, leather.
82.5 x 54.5 x 45 cm (32 1/2 x 21 1/2 x 17 3/4 in.)
Produced by Fritz Hansen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Seat with remnants of two retailer's paper labels.

Estimate
HK$22,000 - 30,000 
€2,700-3,700
$2,800-3,800

Contact Specialist

Nick Wilson
Senior Director, Head of Editions, Photographs and Design, Asia
nickwilson@phillips.com
+852 2318 2022
 

Editions, Photographs and Design

Hong Kong Auction 12 December 2024