Hans J. Wegner
Nearly five hundred chairs, one lifelong question: how little can a chair be and still be right. Hans J. Wegner spent seven decades in Danish workshops answering it, treating every joint, curve and armrest as a problem to be solved on its own terms rather than dressed up as style.
Trained as a cabinetmaker before he was ever a designer, Wegner worked from the bench rather than the drawing board, developing his ideas through close, often years-long collaborations with individual workshops ā Johannes Hansen, Carl Hansen & SĆøn, Getama ā each suited to a different register of his work. Morentz presents a selection spanning that range, from the exhibition-grade pieces made for Johannes Hansen to the sculptural rope-and-teak icons that carried Danish Modern across the Atlantic.
From an apprenticeship in TĆønder to 'The Chair'
Born in the southern Danish town of TĆønder, the son of a shoemaker, Wegner began training as a cabinetmaker at fourteen and had completed four years under master H.F. Stahlberg by the time he turned eighteen. He moved to Copenhagen to study at the School of Arts and Crafts from 1936 to 1938, then joined architects Arne Jacobsen and Erik MĆøller in Aarhus to design furniture for the new Aarhus City Hall ā his first serious commission.
It was in this period that master joiner Johannes Hansen began following Wegner's progress; their collaboration, formalised through the 1940s, produced showpieces built for Copenhagen's Cabinetmakers' Guild exhibitions, among them the Round Chair of 1949, developed from Wegner's studies of Ming dynasty portrait chairs. In 1950, a separate partnership with Carl Hansen & SĆøn brought the related Wishbone Chair (CH24) into continuous production, a chair still made to Wegner's original drawings today.
One designer, several workshops, several registers
Wegner rarely worked with a single manufacturer. Johannes Hansen produced the high-craft, exhibition-grade pieces ā the Round Chair, later dubbed simply 'The Chair' after it appeared in the televised 1960 KennedyāNixon debate; Carl Hansen & SĆøn took the related Wishbone Chair into wider, exportable production from 1950 onward; Getama produced the rope-seated Flag Halyard Chair, later continued by PP MĆøbler.
Across these different partners, the underlying discipline never changed: joinery refined to the point of disappearing, materials chosen and finished by someone who had spent a lifetime in a workshop rather than behind a desk. The results range from the disciplined oak-and-cane Wishbone Chair to the sculptural Flag Halyard lounge ā furniture designed to be used for a lifetime, not a season.
The chair is the object closest to humans.