Taft - Morphologies and Genealogies: Shaker Furniture and Danish Design

Design and Culture
The Journal of the Design Studies Forum
ISSN: 1754-7075 (Print) 1754-7083 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfdc20
Morphologies and Genealogies: Shaker Furniture

and Danish Design
Maggie Taft
To cite this article: Maggie Taft (2015) Morphologies and Genealogies: Shaker Furniture and
Danish Design, Design and Culture, 7:3, 313-334, DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2015.1105709
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2015.1105709
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Morphologies and
Genealogies: Shaker
Furniture and Danish
Design
Maggie Taft
Dr Maggie Taft is an Andrew W. ABSTRACT This essay interrogates the influence
313 Design and Culture DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2015.1105709

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in
Modeling Interdisciplinary of Shaker furniture on mid-century Danish design.
Inquiry at Washington Though but one among many international and
University in St Louis. historical referents, the Shaker one was, I argue,
mtaft@wustl.edu
crucial to the positive reception and powerful sig-
nificance of Danish design in the postwar United
States. I begin with an analysis of formal resem-
blance and then contextualize the legibility and
the significance of this resemblance within popular
culture. The article aims both to consider the ramifi-
cations of design influence beyond the construction
of formal genealogies and to advance our histori-
cal understanding of mid-century Danish design’s
structural intervention into modernism at large.
KEYWORDS: Danish design, Shaker furniture, Index of

American Design, morphology, genealogy, Edward Deming
and Faith Andrews, Leslie Cheek, Jr., mid-century modern,
Modernism
M. Taft
In the spring of 2014, Nicolai de Gier and his students from Det
Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design, og
Konservering (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of
Architecture, Design, and Conservation) exhibited “Morphology –
Stick and Cushion” at the Milan Furniture Fair. The students showed
class projects combining the stick-chair type with upholstery, as
explained by the project’s mission, to “generate innovative ideas”
(Morphology 2014).1 In II, Astrid Tolnov and Elise Tessier’s simple
wooden frame stores beneath its seat a cushion that unfurls and
flips up to supply a textured surface pouring over the minimalist con-
struction. Johan Jeppesen and Jesper Su Rosenmeier’s Stik is a
basket-like seat of round stocks and paper cords in which the stick
itself is transformed into upholstery. “The idea”, de Gier explained of
the assignment, “is to learn from the classic Danish furniture tradition
working methods and apply them in a modern context” (Buhl 2014).
This article is about the influence of American Shaker furniture
on mid-twentieth-century Danish design. But I begin with the recent
exhibition in Milan because I want to use its concept of morphol-
ogy to consider the ramifications of influence beyond the construc-
tion of formal genealogies. De Gier and his students were looking
to the work of mid-twentieth-century designers Børge Mogensen
and Hans Wegner, and appropriating not only some of their designs
but also their shared method of borrowing historical elements,
or “ancient types”, to realize new ones that are “original and per-
sonal” (Morphology 2014). The exhibition’s title seems to have been
designed to refer to this process of transformation.
However, the term “morphology” refers not just to variation in
form but also, literally, to the study of form, and, conceptually, to
the history of variation in form (Oxford English Dictionary 2014).
Indeed, a handful of projects made explicit reference to iconic
models. The Eight Chair by Takumi Yoshida and Yuanmo Xie riffed
on the construction of Wegner’s Circle Chair (1965), reintroduc-
ing one of his less renowned designs into public view. And Eva
Fly and Suguru Kobayashi’s Needle Chair, which paired structural
features of Finn Juhl’s Chieftain Chair (1949) with the simplicity of
many of Mogensen’s designs for the furniture co-op FDB Møbler,
constructed a point of contact between the work of two designers
typically viewed as oppositional. In The Eight Chair and the Needle
Chair, citation vivifies the new design as much as it does the refer-
ent. In other words, citation generates innovative interpretations of
historical designs through the production of new design ideas.
314 Design and Culture
This is evident also in the mid-twentieth-century Danish furni-

ture that had, as de Gier points out, its own references. Wegner, it
was said in a 1959 issue of Industrial Design, had been educated
in all the great exemplars of Chinese, Egyptian, and Shaker chairs,
tables, and chests (B.D. 1959, 57). His designs for the China Chair
(1944) and, later the Wishbone Chair (1949), drew from the chairs
used by Chinese royalty during the Ming dynasty and from an
Morphologies and Genealogies: Shaker Furniture and Danish Design
ighteenth-century folding variation reproduced in influential books

e
by architect Esbjørn Hiort and design historian Ole Wanscher. For
Wanscher’s own Egyptian Stool (1957), he took as its source a
recent archeological find. And Juhl’s Karmstol (1953) borrowed from
the ancient Greek klismos chair a structure in which the armrests are
integrated into the seatback.
In other instances, mid-century Danish designers drew from
nineteenth-century Austrian forms, British safari chairs, Italian
vernacular design, Welsh Windsor, and Shaker furnishings. The
influences were many. But for at least a few mid-century American
designer-writers, the Shaker one was particularly vital. According
to Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed writing in 1956,

“contemporary Danish furniture makers first drew their inspiration
from a pattern book of Shaker furniture which fell into their hands”
(Tunnard and Reed 1956, 73–74).2 The truth of this origin story may
be impossible to verify, but the genealogy is nevertheless important
because, in identifying the antecedent to Danish Modern, Tunnard
and Reed also affirm the significance of Shaker as an important
historical style in the postwar period.3
This essay historicizes the influence of Shaker furniture on
mid-century Danish design. Its ambitions are twofold. First, under-
standing the significance of that genealogy in the postwar United
States helps to illuminate why Danish design emerged as the pre-
dominant style, ambitiously attributed the ability to “provide some
impetus for a greater, more human utilization” of America’s “truly
remarkable” manufacturing and material means (Cheek 1954). Sec-
ond, interrogating the construction of that lineage advances our
historical understanding of mid-century Danish design’s structural
intervention into modernism at large.
Danish Modern’s Shaker Roots

If Tunnard and Reed attributed the first inspiration for Danish design
to Shaker pattern books rather generally, a 1977 exhibition at Shaker
Village in New Gloucester, Maine identified with much greater spec-
ificity the first contact between Danish designers and Shaker furni-
ture. In this account, it is Copenhagen during the autumn of 1927
when Danish sculptor Einar Utzon-Frank showed designer and
teacher Kaare Klint a No. 7 Mount Lebanon armed rocking chair
(Danish Foreign Ministry 1977). Klint admired it and asked two of
his students at the Royal Academy to render drawings of the chair
(Figure 1). He then commissioned Rud. Rasmussen, the cabinet-

maker with whom Klint frequently collaborated, to fabricate a replica.
With only minor variations, such as a flat rather than curved top rail,
this copy was displayed in the window of Rud. Rasmussen’s shop
alongside a label that read, “Designed by Kaare Klint”.
The story dates Klint’s introduction to Shaker as precisely contem-
porary with the first Copenhagen Cabinetmaker’s Guild Exhibition
M. Taft
Figure 1
#7 Mount Lebanon Armed Rocking Chair and rendering by Kaare Klint’s student, O. Brøndum Christensen;
from Ole Wanscher, The Art of Furniture: 5000 Years of Furniture and Interiors
(New York: Reinhold, 1967, 390–1).
(Snedkerlaugets Udstilling). Inaugurated in the autumn of 1927,

the annual exhibition is typically regarded as a crucial precursor to
the postwar emergence of modern Danish design because it facil-
itated innovative collaborations between furniture arkitekts, trained
in the recently established furniture department led by Klint at The
Royal Academy, and the established field of cabinetmakers hop-
ing to reinvigorate their guild’s struggling cottage industry.4 The
annual Cabinetmaker’s Guild Exhibition and Klint’s exposure to the
Mount Lebanon rocking chair were not directly connected. But
what Klint saw in the rocker was precisely the thing that the cab-
inetmakers were striving for in their exhibition – what arkitekt and
design historian Ole Wanscher would later identify as “very sim-
ple but aesthetically refined models that were executed in [wood]
and were widely sold” (Wanscher 1966, 396).5 Furthermore, the
geographic and temporal proximity of the inaugural exhibition and
Klint’s appropriation affirms the availability of at least one Shaker

object in the formative years for Danish design that followed, not
only for Klint but also for the young generation of designers he
taught at the Royal Academy and for cabinetmakers like Rud.
Rasmussen.
It is unclear exactly which other Shaker objects, if any, Danish

designers, students, and cabinetmakers may have been looking to
in the 1930s. But Faith and Edward Deming Andrews’ Shaker Furni-
ture: The Craftsmanship of an American Communal Sect was widely
available to design students after it was published in 1937. Grete
Jalk, for instance, attributed her first introduction to Shaker furniture
to the book, which she studied in the early 1940s while a student at
the School of Arts and Crafts, now part of the School of Design (Jalk
1967). And to this day, a first-edition copy of the text remains in the
Royal Academy’s furniture department library.
The illustrations in the Andrews’ book supplied a deep catalogue
from which to draw and its text a number of distinctive characteristics

already shared by Danish design. These included “the rod-shaped
to subtle tapered turnings of stand- and table-legs, with foot or ter-
minal shaping entirely omitted”; “the comparative lowness of chairs,
tables and stands”; “exposed dovetailing and a frequent omission of
moldings”; and “combination pieces” – designs that could be modi-
fied to perform a variety of different functions (Andrews and Andrews
1937, 27, 28). Furthermore, the book’s images of interiors with fur-
niture objects in situ, paired with books or textiles and little else,
resembled the practice already in use in the Cabinetmaker’s Guild
Exhibitions, where furniture was arranged into what one critic would
later call “little scenes” (M.N. 1948). The photographs of Shaker inte-
riors depicted furniture that, in its wooden materials, simple forms,
and suggestive staging, looked like Danish design.
Of course this was rather the point. As historian William Moore
has recently argued, Shaker furnishings were popularized in the
United States during the 1930s precisely because they bore resem-
blance to contemporary modernist designs (Moore 2013, 11–12).
The Andrews’ book was but one project in a broader effort to
develop a historical American culture.6 Far more significant state-
side, and preceding the publication of Shaker Furniture, was the
Index of American Design, a depression-era, Federal Arts Project
(FAP) effort to catalogue not only Shaker material culture but also
many other “articles of daily use and adornment in this country from
early colonial times to the close of the nineteenth century” (Cahill in
Christensen 1950, ix).7
Begun in 1935 and concluded in 1942, the Index commissioned
18,000 watercolors depicting a wide variety of unauthored Ameri-
can craft objects. From furniture and textiles to apparel and toys, all
were made before 1890 and selected for what was retrospectively
described as “their artistic quality” (Christensen 1950, v). Advancing

this art-ness, each object included in the Index was painted against
a plain white background. (Though the watercolors were often made
on site, every rendering removed the depicted object from its con-
text.) Some years after the project was concluded, Holger Cahill,
National Director of the FAP, explained that the project’s purpose
was to generate “a genuine consciousness of our rich national
M. Taft
eritage […] which has impressed its forms upon our contemporary
h
culture” (Cahill, cited in Christensen 1950, xvii, ix). It was assembled
to establish a canon of American art, one that emerged from the
popular and that stood in opposition to the elite traditions of Europe
(Clayton 2002, 19–32; Moore 2013, 10).
The 350 renderings of Shaker objects comprised an important
part of the Index’s portrait of America. For Cahill, Shaker furni-
ture in particular fulfilled the Index’s mission with remarkable dex-
terity. According to Cahill, lecturing in 1936, Shaker furniture and
craft “in its simplicity, its beautiful proportion, and its functionalism
has a great relevance to contemporary design” (Cahill 1937, 13).
This opinion was widely shared by other members of the project,

as well as members of the press. When, for instance, Arthur Millier
reviewed a Los Angeles exhibition of the Index in 1938, he described
the renderings of Shaker furnishings to depict “austerely functional
furniture”, and reported that his guide, Mildred Holzhauer, an FAP
employee, “led [him] firmly back to the Shaker furniture”, and told
him that, “‘the machine today is producing simple, functional things,
more like these’” (Millier 1938).8
Cahill reiterated this years later, in 1950. Nearly a decade after
the completion of the Index, Cahill explained that due to its “severe
integrity in handling materials, its discarding of ornament in favor of
unadorned surface and its sense of fitness and function”, Shaker
furniture and craft “is as much a forerunner of modern ideas as
it is a reflection of the past” (Cahill, cited in Christensen 1950,
xvi). Thus, the Index tracked an alternative genealogy of modern
design’s simplicity and function, one that bypassed Europe in favor
of an American foundation. In 1951, when designing his line for the
Michigan-based Baker furniture company, Finn Juhl recognized the
project’s intentions in a popular design-industry slogan: “American
furniture for American citizens” (Juhl, quoted in Boheman 1951, 22).
Historical revival projects like the Index and the Andrews’ book
helped to establish this new category of national design by giving it
a historical foundation. In Shaker Furniture, the Andrews invoked the
furniture’s functionalist inclinations with the Shaker maxim, “Beauty
rests on utility”, and went on to compare Shaker ideas about furni-
ture with those of William Morris, already widely known as the father
of modern design (Andrews and Andrews 1937, 21).9 To support
this genealogy, Faith and Edward Andrews and the makers of the
Index were selective in the objects they included. For instance,
though the Shakers often painted or stained their furniture to give
it color, the Index captured primarily unpainted wooden pieces, var-

nished or lacquered and then sanded down with a pumice stone to
give a matte finish. (While the Andrews acknowledged the tendency
towards subtle color, the illustrative black-and-white photographs
that accompanied their text failed to represent it.)
But the connection between Danish and Shaker furniture did not
merely recite the tale told by American nationalists and government
Figure 2
Børge Mogensen, Shaker Chair (1942), oak, rush. Courtesy of Wright.
agencies. Danish designers were, indeed, picking up its threads and

borrowing its motifs. Take, for instance, a chair and table Mogensen
designed in 1942 for FDB Møbler, a major manufacturer of afforda-
ble modern furnishings. The J39 Chair’s woven seat, turned girders,
and low-slung, single back slat resembled a piece from Hancock
Village reproduced in the Andrews’ illustrations (Figures 2 and 3).
Known colloquially as Folkestolen, it was translated not literally as
The People’s Chair, but as, instead, The Shaker Chair. A trestle
table with inset legs from the same year that also borrowed from a
Hancock Village version was called, similarly, The Shaker Table.
Where the English-language names of Mogensen’s chair and
table made their referents explicit, other designs from the period
were formally candid without being textually so. A bed, also from
1942, designed by Mogensen and made by cabinetmaker I. Chris-
tiansen, was mounted on casters like those used in both Shaker
beds pictured in the Andrews’ book.10 Even more exactingly, a Frits
Henningsen occasional table from 1940 precisely modeled a Shaker
stand table also reproduced in Shaker Furniture (Figures 4 and 5).
Hans Wegner’s Valet Chair (1953) looked to the sculpted Shaker
saddle seat. Designers as disparate as Wegner and Poul Kjaerholm
borrowed the comb back used in early American fan-back chairs.
Lis Ahlmann’s simple, striped furnishing fabrics offered a variation
on Shaker textiles. And Finn Juhl’s 1951 line for Baker included a
chair that tilted back, its ball joints borrowed from a Shaker inven-
tion that permitted it to lean without scratching the floor, and a bed
that measured forty-five inches wide and eighty-six inches long,
dimensions closer to those of traditional Shaker beds than standard
mid-century ones.11
M. Taft
Figure 3
Faith Andrews and Edward Deming Andrews, Shaker Furniture: The Craftsmanship of an American
Communal Sect (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, London: H. Milford,
Oxford University Press, 1937, pls 2–3).
Figure 4
Frits Henningsen, Occasional Table (c.1940), walnut. Courtesy of Wright.
Figure 5
Faith Andrews and Edward Deming Andrews, Shaker Furniture: The Craftsmanship of an American
Communal Sect (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, London: H. Milford,
Oxford University Press, 1937, pls 12–13).
These citations were implicitly observed in the United States. For

example, a 1959 article on Hans Wegner in the American publication
Industrial Design commended the Danish designer for “the ease with
which he translates his ideas into methods of the machine”, while
simultaneously asserting that a piece like his Round Chair (1949)
was “not, of course, a mass-produced chair” (B.D. 1959, 56). This
echoed the Andrews’ assertion that “The exaltation of handwork,
aided but never usurped by the machines, was the Shaker ideal to
which William Morris, and in this day, many another would return”
(Andrews 1937, 63). In making such a claim, Faith and Edward
Deming Andrews and the makers of the Index made it so. For when
they retroactively selected Shaker furniture as a predecessor to
the modern and canonized it, they also made it available to Danish
designers for their appropriation and use. Reinterpreting the history
of design, that is, helped to redirect its future.
Danish Design in American Culture

Efforts in the 1930s to establish an American cultural history were
not merely part of a specialist discourse of collectors, historians, and
craft professionals. They also helped to construct a public culture
that, historically rather than regionally situated, helped to unify the
M. Taft
nation.12 The Index was especially important in this regard. Originally,

the watercolor renderings commissioned by the project were to be
reproduced in a series of portfolios organized around various media
and subjects such as metalwork and Shaker artifacts. These were
to be distributed to libraries and schools and also made available for
private purchase so that a broad cross-section of Americans would
be exposed to objects from their national past (Cahill 1937, 15–16).
Though the Shaker portfolio was never published – only three such
portfolios ever were – prints reproducing the watercolor depictions
of chairs, tables, beds, textiles, and more were widely disseminated
in a series of exhibitions held throughout the late 1930s and early
1940s. These exhibitions were held not only in museums, includ-

ing the Museum of Modern Art, and galleries, sometimes along-
side the objects they depicted. They were also shown in libraries,
bookstores, hotels, banks, antique shops, and department stores
across the country, from Macy’s in New York City to Marshall Field
in Chicago, Stix, Baer & Fuller in St Louis to Bullocks in Los Angeles
(Clayton 2002, 18). There, in these sites of everyday life, Americans
were introduced to their national culture. The “art” collected by the
Index was “interwoven with the very stuff and texture of our national
life” (Cahill 1937, 3). (This was especially so in the department store,
where modern design, too, was commonly exhibited.)13 Once intro-
duced, Shaker furnishings caught hold.14
In 1937, Herman Miller – the furniture manufacturing company
and, after the war, one of the primary distributors of Danish Modern
in the United States – released a line of Shaker-inspired furniture
designed by Freda Diamond (Herman Miller Furniture Company
1938). Eight years later, House and Garden encouraged its readers
to incorporate Shaker furniture into their postwar homes by
recasting it as “‘Shaker design’ – as aesthetically apt today as its
pared-down functionalism was practical and right for the “Believers’”
(Lassiter 1945, 37). In addition to national periodicals like Life and
the New York Herald Tribune, smaller papers like the Berkshire
Eagle published articles on Shaker design, identifying its makers as
“superb craftsmen” and taking note of the furniture’s “simple forms
and functional economy” (Dooley 1936). Here, in the popular press,
the specialist’s language of functionalism took root in the vernacular.
This was important to Danish furniture’s postwar success in the
United States. Even though the furniture was Danish, and decidedly
so, its apparent reference to historical American designs was legi-
ble to Americans well versed in the formal and rhetorical vocabulary
of Shaker furniture. The relationship was announced across period

publications, from specialist ones like Industrial Design, declaring
the Shaker influence on Wegner, to more popular ones like Vogue,
which, in a 1958 article on the interior design preferences of young
couples, noted that “Here the Shaker influence […] and the graceful
clean-swept lines of modern Danish design find a common meeting
ground” (135).
The likeness was also patently visible. At the bank and at the
post office, at the museum and at the department store, Americans
had seen Shaker stands and trestle tables, ladder-back chairs, and
striped and checkered textiles, and they knew that Americans had
made them. “Shaker furniture is famous for its functional design, and
[…] their old products are now being widely sought” (142), reported
Life magazine in 1947. Though Danish Modern was drawing from a
whole host of varied references, it looked familiar to postwar Amer-
icans knowledgeable about their Shaker past. It looked as though
this modern European style had emerged from local production.
In the postwar United States, this was a powerful thing. The young
country had by war’s end achieved political and economic power on

both sides of the Atlantic. But American culture was still deemed, in
the words of one historian, “trashy, vulgar, and primitive”, shaped by
Hollywood, Norman Rockwell, and Tin Pan Alley (Berghahn 2003,
117). When in 1954 Leslie Cheek, Jr., director of the Virginia Museum
of Fine Arts and coordinator of the landmark exhibition Design in
Scandinavia, posed the question, “Do Americans have good taste?”
(Cheek 1954), his answer was a resounding no.15 As evidence, he
described historicist interiors variously inspired by Spanish, Tudor,
Queen Anne, Colonial, and French manorial styles accented with
cocktail bars shaped like cobbler’s benches and flatware with filigree
so ornate it impeded function. Cheek diagnosed these as symp-
toms of an American sense of cultural inferiority, soothed through
citation of prominent styles imported from Europe and the past. But
the result was chaos, illustrated by an accompanying sketch of a
young couple lost in a menagerie of styles – a Baroque candelabra,
a country spinning wheel, a Victorian birdcage, a modern Grupo
Austral butterfly chair, to name but a few (Figure 6). “Popular taste
in America,” Cheek insisted, “particularly as it is expressed in the
furnishing of the home is, on the whole, derivative, unsure of itself.”
Danish references to a Shaker past, however, demonstrated the
prominence of an existing American culture.
By the mid-1950s, American designers were also looking to
Shaker objects. Interior decorating consultant Mary L. Brandt cited
the influence of “countrified eighteenth-century Shaker furniture”
(Brandt 1955, 95) on American designers like T. H. Robsjohn-Gib-
bings and Paul McCobb. But Danish design’s European provenance
imbued its quotation of a Shaker vocabulary with unique signifi-
cance. Its apparent references to historical American furnishings
counteracted an anxious sense of American inferiority. Denmark
was not France, to be sure, but it was continental Europe and its
advanced modern design confirmed that historical American culture
was not so puerile as many overseas thought it to be, or so barren
as many at home feared that it was.16
M. Taft
Figure 6
Leonard Shortall, illustration for Leslie Cheek Jr., “Do Americans Have Good Taste?,” New York Times,
6 June 1954. Courtesy of Thomas Leonard Shortall.
Danish Design and the Democratic Subject

In the early years of the Cold War, Danish design’s aesthetic reso-
nance with Shaker furniture also had political implications. Shaker
material culture was understood as part of a cultural history – Edward
Andrews wrote in 1940 that it emerged from “a culture group with
a recorded history” that was important “in the development of the
country” (Andrews 1940) – and also as part of a democratic one.17 In
The Index of American Design, a 1950s’ effort to distribute the Index
further by way of a publication, author Erwin O. Christensen insisted
that Shaker production was possible “only in a country that offered
freedom from persecution”, and where “an atmosphere of tolerance
encouraged experiments” (Christensen 1950, 15). Shaker craft was
heralded domestically as evidence of a historical artistry generated

by the nation’s political circumstances. By appropriating this home-
grown American idiom, Danish Modern suggested that the nation
that had bore it was similarly aligned. Just as Abstract Expression-
ism was exhibited on foreign shores to promote American freedom
and values, Danish furniture, imported from overseas, affirmed that
those values were reflecting back to the home country.18
If formal resemblance made political allegiance visible, few objects

would have achieved this more successfully than Frits Henningsen’s
walnut occasional table (Figure 4). The table, with its triad legs like
rudders, sculpted basin, and the beveled lip of the tabletop, was
nearly identical to common Shaker candle stands, though, at 25.5
inches tall, it stood a half-inch taller than the Shaker one’s standard
height.
But Henningsen’s table carried a significant distinction from the
Shaker versions typically executed in cherry. While the Shaker tables
were anonymously attributed, in press and promotion, Henningsen’s
name was plainly attached to his own version. This apparently minor
distinction hints at how the Danish interpretation of Shaker furnishings

extended beyond suggestive allegiance not only to reproduce but
also to advance a postwar American politics. The Shaker table
was not the only instance of a Danish designer applying his name
to an anonymous, historical design. Klint did the same with his No.
7 rocking chair and with his Safari Chair (which was based on the
Roorkhee Chair developed by anonymous British engineers in India),
and Ole Wanscher did it with his Egyptian Stool. But the Shaker case
is especially significant. It opens up the contested role of the individual
in mid-century American culture, amid concern about how to forge a
coherent national identity in a country that prided itself on individualism.
The stand table was included in both the Andrews’ book and
the Index (Figures 5 and 7). In the Index, it went, like all the pro-
ject’s objects, unattributed – a stark contrast to the naming of the
artist, Victor F. Muollo, responsible for rendering it. Though Muollo
and the Index’s other artists were working from specific pieces, this
helped to establish the individual objects included as exemplary of
a type rather than as themselves unique pieces. The stand table’s
anonymity also, of course, owes to the fact that Shaker pieces often
went unsigned. Along with the objects depicted in the Index, this
fact has been canonized as one of the core features of Shaker craft,
attributed to what was at mid-century understood to be the group’s
ideological commitments to modesty and community.
In the Andrews’ Shaker Furniture, the stand table’s maker was
similarly unattributed. There, too, anonymity emphasized the per-
vasiveness of tables of its kind. But in their text, the Andrews also
insisted upon the role of the unique craftsman. Though they con-
ceded that:
The communal nature of all industrial or craft enterprise resulted

in a furniture largely devoid of those marks of individuality which

make it possible to distinguish the work of one craftsman from
that of another. It is helpful, nevertheless to call attention to that
spirit of independence, particularly in the more creative phases
of production, which is not normally associated with a commu-
nistic economy. The Shaker joiner was a free and self-reliant
craftsman. (Andrews and Andrews 1937, 33)
M. Taft
Figure 7
Victor F. Muollo, Candle Stand (c.1936), watercolor, graphite, and gouache
on paperboard. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
While the Index identified the objects it contained as the product of

anonymous craft culture, the Andrews’ asserted individuality amidst
that anonymity. To this end, their book compiled a list of well-known
furniture-makers and detailed instances of inscription wherein one
person dedicated an object to another to show that “Independence
of thought and action soon showed itself in the development of
forms expressive of original ideas” (Andrews and Andrews 1937, 3).
In Shaker Furniture, the Andrews’ were clearly wrestling with how to
define the role of the individual in a community.

This was hardly just a matter of how to make sense of Shaker
history. The Andrews’ dilemma echoed questions about the relation-
ship between psychology and polity being posed by period thinkers
like Margaret Mead, David Riesman, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert
Bayer, social scientists and émigré intellectuals for whom the del-
icate relationship between individual and community was central
Figure 8
Advertisement for George Tanier, The New Yorker, December 28,
1957. DesignMuseum Denmark.
to the construction of a democratic future.19 How, in other words,

could public culture foment both coherent communities and indi-
viduated persons? Danish design helped to reconcile the potential
antagonism.
M. Taft
For mid-century-historian David Potter – who, it so happens,

was instrumental in an ultimately unsuccessful late 1950s effort to
bring the Andrews’ own collection of Shaker artifacts to Yale – the
individual and the community were inextricable. They mutually and
simultaneously structured one another through material culture,
which carried forward values from one generation to the next (Potter
1954).20 According to Leslie Cheek, Jr., it was precisely this rela-
tionship that distinguished Scandinavian taste from American. “It is
possible for a Scandinavian woman buying a machine-produced
fabric to pick it up, examine it without affectation, and pronounce it
good or bad” (Cheek 1954), he wrote, and attributed the skill to craft
knowledge handed down from one generation to another through

the literal inheritance of a loom.21 Imagined as the loom may have
been, Cheek’s account identifies the encounter with the object as an
evaluative one in which judgment is exercised rather than foretold.
Knowledge of the past permits this – Cheek’s Scandinavian woman
deploys familiarity with traditional craft to skillfully evaluate the mass
produced. (Indeed, this was the subject of a series of advertisements
circulated by the Danish furniture importer George Tanier and pub-
lished in The New Yorker magazine from late 1957 through 1958.
Each featured a photograph of an ordinary Danish expat alongside a
piece of furniture and a first-person quote, in which the pictured per-
son gave their name – Inge Andersen, Per Sabroe – their nationality
– always insistently Danish – and their commendation for the piece
of furniture pictured (Figure 8).
By the 1950s, efforts like the Index had armed America with its
own craft history. Invoking this history, Danish design solicited a
similar kind of evaluative attention. Danish-born American designer
Jens Risom identified this as Danish design’s primary contribution.
“They”, he said of the furniture, “have intensified the feeling for qual-
ity on the part of the public as well as the furniture line. They have
developed the feeling for good construction and elaborated details”
(Risom, quoted in D. 1955, 33–4). Danish design did not just out-
fit the American public with good design. According to Risom, it
also armed them with perceptual skill so that they, too, like Cheek’s
Scandinavians, could determine the difference between good and
bad, between “mass-produced articles and those generated by the
esthetics of personal expression” (Cheek 1954). It was not the mak-
er’s handicraft, alone, that was so fundamental to Danish design.
It was also, especially, the public’s ability to recognize it. Through
reference to an American Shaker past, mid-century Danish furniture
helped to equip postwar Americans with the evaluative ability on

which active political life depended. It prepared them to differentiate
between mass-produced and personal expression, between mass
mentality and personal freedom.
Appropriating American cultural history and refracting it through
a European lens, Danish design helped to furnish a democratic
future. Embedded in this transnational exchange were complex
transactions and transformations. First, the 1930s saw a cultural

excavation to dig up historical objects that supported period prac-
tices. The finds were then exported to Denmark where, appropri-
ated, sampled, and stylized, they served as true references. And
finally, these Danish designs were shipped back to the United States
where they became, themselves, sources of influence and inspira-
tion.
It is here, I propose by way of conclusion, in this narrative of
exchange, that Danish design’s broader significance in the history
of modern design emerges as a critical intervention. This is not so
much because the furniture disrupts modernism’s look, replacing
steel with wood and strict geometries with biomorphic forms, but
because it scrambles the clean genealogy on which modernism
depends. Here there is no orderly progress of form. Rather, the mor-
phology is convoluted. It involves not only the development of new
designs, original and personal, but also the construction of new his-
tories that hold inside of them a multitude of possible futures.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2014 CAA
panel “The Influence of Scandinavian Design in America”, chaired
by Bobbye Tigerman and moderated by Kjetil Fallan. Thanks are
due to Bobbye, Kjetil, and the panelists – Erin Leary, Monica Ob-
niski, and Leena Svinhufvud. I am very grateful to the two anony-
mous reviewers at Design & Culture for their careful reading and
excellent feedback. For invaluable conversations, comments, and
questions, I would also like to thank, above all, Christine Mehring, as
well as Darby English, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Debbie Nelson, Claudia
Brittenham, Solveig Nelson, Savannah Esquival, Kris Driggers, and
those in the library at DesignMuseum Danmark, especially Anja
Lollesgaard. Fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Center
for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The American-Scandinavian
Foundation, and The Lois Roth Endowment Fund afforded me the
opportunity to carry out the research for this essay.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For images of these chairs, see http://morphology.dk/chairs.

html/.
2. That Shaker furniture influenced mid-century Danish furniture
is already well established; e.g. Danish Foreign Ministry (1977);
Becksvoort (2000, 19–21); and Olesen (2014, 58, 99).
3. The furniture’s significance is tied to the culture of the group that
made it. The Shaker sect, formally called the United Society of
M. Taft
Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, was formed as a Quaker

offshoot in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, before relocating to
the United States in the 1770s. By 1779, Shaker immigrants, led
by Ann Lee, had purchased land outside of Albany, New York, and
there constituted themselves as a society codified by a shared
commitment to community, celibacy, and confession of sin. In
Shaker doctrine, individuals were encouraged to efface personal
interest in favor of the community, giving according to one’s abil-
ities and taking only according to need. Such community was
made manifest by the “families’ – relatively self-sufficient groups
of thirty to one hundred men and women who lived together
under the same roof – that organized Shaker settlements.

Since celibacy serves as a foundational principle of the Shaker
faith, the religious community could be maintained only through
conversion and by the mid-twentieth century, membership was
dwindling and Shaker communities expiring. But the marginal
group’s commitment to simplicity, practicality, and communal
organization that was based in faith and so free of politics (i.e.
communism) was increasingly viewed as “authentically Ameri-
can” (Andrews and Andrews 1966, xi).
4. At mid-century, the terms “design” and “designer” was not
often used. Rather, furniture was called by the Danish word
møbelkunst, directly translated as “furniture art”, and those who
designed it were, depending on their training, known as møbel
arkitekts. This title was reserved for those who had studied at
The Royal Academy School of Architecture. Despite this histor-
ical distinction in terminology, throughout this article I use the
terms “design” and “designer”, For the most part, I employ them
colloquially rather than interpretively.
5. Notably, Wanscher illustrated his discussion of Shaker furniture
with a photograph and an architectural drawing of the Mount
Lebanon rocker. These are illustrated in Figure 1.
6. Such efforts extended earlier ones from the 1910s and 1920s.
For more on this, see, for instance, Corn (1999, 317–27).
7. In 1935, the Whitney Museum of American Art had organized
Shaker Handicraft, a small, month-long exhibition of Shaker fur-
nishings. Though it preceded both the Index and the publication
of the Andrews’ book, the Whitney exhibition had far less of a
national, let alone international, impact than either of the subse-
quent projects.
8. Arts reporter Ruth Green Harris echoed this in a New York Times
article about the Index. She wrote that Shaker “stood for cleanli-
ness, honesty and frugality. […] Few folk arts serve so well as an
example to contemporary designers” (Harris 1939).
9. Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From
William Morris to Walter Gropius had been published in 1936, a
year prior to the Andrews’ book.
10. When exhibited at the 1942 cabinetmakers’ exhibition, however,

the Mogensen-designed bed was tucked tightly into a corner, so
rendering its wheels inert.
11. Juhl affirmed the importance of Shaker in Hjemmets Indretning,
his popular book on modern home décor (Juhl 1954, 19). And in
both the Danish- and English-language versions of his essential
mid-century monograph of furniture history, which culminates in
the rather anachronistic rise of Danish design, Ole Wanscher,
Denmark’s premier design historian at mid-century, echoes
Juhl’s claim (Wanscher 1961; 1966, 396).
12. In her essay on the Index, Virginia Tuttle Clayton, quoting his-
torian Michael Kammen, refers to the Index as “an historically

based public culture” (Clayton 2002, 1).
13. Marilyn F. Friedman has argued that department store exhibi-
tions were fundamental in introducing a broad public to modern
design and “gave commercial credibility to the modern move-
ment” (Friedman 2003, 5).
14. The twentieth-century spread of Shaker into fine art and popular
cultures in both the United States and Britain is well documented
in Bowe and Richmond (2007).
15. A 1959 article in Interiors magazine echoed this sentiment.
“Today there is a large-scale interest, not to say preoccupation,
with ‘the better life’” (156), the magazine explained. But, quoting
a July 1959 piece in Fortune magazine, the article went on to
say that “The American housewife wants furniture in good taste
[…] but does not know for sure what good taste in furniture is.’”
16. I borrow the term “puerile” from French painter André Villeboeuf
describing postwar American painting: “Here is painting justly
styled ‘International’ without origin, without taste; marked alone
by an originality that accentuates the indecency of its arrogance,
the puerility of its conceit” (Villeboeuf quoted in Guilbaut 1985,
43). Meanwhile, the term barren is Cahill’s: “Up to recent years
most Americans have had something of an inferiority complex
about American art. Many of them have been far too ready to
say that it has been rather barren; that the paths of American art
in the past have been few” (Cahill 1937, 3).
17. In a 1941 address, Holger Cahill attributed the success of the
Index to the fact that the “common man” seemed “to recognize
that these arts fit very closely into the context of our democratic
life” (Cahill quoted in Clayton 2002, 4).
18. Abstract Expressionism’s role in promoting American freedom
and values overseas is, at this point, well known. In compan-

ion essays published in Artforum in the early 1970s, critics Eva
Cockcroft and Max Kozloff showed how the US government
formalized a propaganda program abroad through a surge of
cultural diplomacy initiatives that highlighted Abstract Expres-
sionism. The heroism of American painting could be found in
its demonstration of radical individuality. Only under democracy,
M. Taft
these large canvases were shown to say, was such expression

possible. Serge Guilbaut’s landmark book How New York Stole
the Idea of Modern Art (1983) advanced these revelations to
demonstrate how postwar American painters developed their
mode of pictorial production in tandem with a new ideology of
political apoliticism, and produced a style that was neither left
nor right, but simultaneously liberated and liberating (Cockcroft
1974, 39–42; Kozloff 1973, 43–54; Guilbaut 1985).
19. For more on this problem of the relationship between individual
and community, especially nation, at mid-century, see Turner
(2013, 39–76).
20. My understanding of Potter’s ideas is deeply indebted to and

paraphrases Turner (2013, 218–20).
21. This idea of a popular craft knowledge in Scandinavia was a
common refrain: “The Scandinavian lives out of a handmade
tradition”, declared House Beautiful magazine (1959, 91), for
instance.
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ture: The Craftsmanship of an American Communal Sect. New
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Becksvoort, Christian. 2000. The Shaker Legacy: Perspectives on
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Brandt, Mary L. 1955. How to Plan Your Living Room. New York:
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Design and Culture

The Journal of the Design Studies Forum

ISSN: 1754-7075 (Print) 1754-7083 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfdc20

Morphologies and Genealogies: Shaker Furniture

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2015.1105709

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313 Design and Culture DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2015.1105709

KEYWORDS: Danish design, Shaker furniture, Index of

This is evident also in the mid-twentieth-century Danish furni-

­ ighteenth-century folding variation reproduced in influential books

to Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed writing in 1956,

Danish Modern’s Shaker Roots

(Figure 1). He then commissioned Rud. Rasmussen, the cabinet-

(Snedkerlaugets Udstilling). Inaugurated in the autumn of 1927,

Klint’s appropriation affirms the availability of at least one Shaker

It is unclear exactly which other Shaker objects, if any, Danish

from which to draw and its text a number of distinctive characteristics

described as “their artistic quality” (Christensen 1950, v). Advancing

This opinion was widely shared by other members of the project,

it color, the Index captured primarily unpainted wooden pieces, var-

agencies. Danish designers were, indeed, picking up its threads and

These citations were implicitly observed in the United States. For

Danish Design in American Culture

nation.12 The Index was especially important in this regard. Originally,

1940s. These exhibitions were held not only in museums, includ-

of Shaker furniture. The relationship was announced across period

country had by war’s end achieved political and economic power on

Danish Design and the Democratic Subject

heralded domestically as evidence of a historical artistry generated

If formal resemblance made political allegiance visible, few objects

distinction hints at how the Danish interpretation of Shaker furnishings

The communal nature of all industrial or craft enterprise resulted

in a furniture largely devoid of those marks of individuality which

While the Index identified the objects it contained as the product of

define the role of the individual in a community.

1957. DesignMuseum Denmark.

to the construction of a democratic future.19 How, in other words,

For mid-century-historian David Potter – who, it so happens,

knowledge handed down from one generation to another through

helped to equip postwar Americans with the evaluative ability on

transactions and transformations. First, the 1930s saw a cultural

1.  For images of these chairs, see http://morphology.dk/chairs.

Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, was formed as a Quaker

under the same roof – that organized Shaker settlements.

10. When exhibited at the 1942 cabinetmakers’ exhibition, however,

torian Michael Kammen, refers to the Index as “an historically

and values overseas is, at this point, well known. In compan-

these large canvases were shown to say, was such expression

20. My understanding of Potter’s ideas is deeply indebted to and

erpool: Liverpool University Press.

Cahill, Holger. 1937. American Design: An Address by Holger Cahill

Cockcroft, Eva. 1974. “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold

Times, March 27.

Olesen, Christian Holmsted. 2014. Wegner: Just One Good Chair.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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ighteenth-century folding variation reproduced in influential books

1. For images of these chairs, see http://morphology.dk/chairs.

10. When exhibited at the 1942 cabinetmakers’ exhibition, however,

20. My understanding of Potter’s ideas is deeply indebted to and