Josef Frank
Josef Frank called his working method ‘accidentism’, half in irony: everything derives spontaneously and should give the impression of having come about by chance.
For Frank, the centre of modernism lay in history and in the culture of everyday life rather than in art and technology. In the 1930s that was a radical position, because it fades away the boundaries between high and low culture. He stood against the modernist belief in the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, with its standard design solution and its pure functionality, and held that ornament and complexity create peacefulness, and with it freedom.
Biography
The Austrian designer, architect and theorist Josef Frank (1885-1967) is considered one of Europe’s leading modernists and most progressive designers of the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in 1885 into a middle-class Jewish family in Baden, a small Austrian spa town. Rather than dedicate himself to the Jugendstil principles that were popular during the Austrian ‘Fin de Siècle’, he substituted an eclectic style inspired by a variety of practices, specialising in interior design and single-family houses for a largely upper-middle-class clientele.
The Austrian ‘Werkbund’, founded in 1912 to encourage collaboration between the arts, crafts and industry, formally split, and a ‘New Werkbund’ was organised in 1933. As one of its initiators, Frank could not ignore the notable anti-Semitic tendency within the organisation and beyond, and decided to leave the country. He and his Swedish wife Anna emigrated to Sweden in 1933, sensing a volatile political situation in Central Europe and a growing fascist movement years before the Nazi regime emerged in Germany. The Swedish designer Estrid Ericson (1894-1981) offered him a position as chief designer at her company Svenskt Tenn, initially to expand the range of furnishings on offer, and the arrangement grew into a partnership of more than three decades. His criticism of modern architecture and design in the early 1930s made him far less popular, with the result that his contributions went unacknowledged in earlier studies.
Models and collaborations
Frank introduced a new design vocabulary, colourful and vibrant, and selected a remarkable variety of materials for his furniture designs.