by Hedvig Hedqvist

published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Summer 2008 Issue, Volume #6
See here for subscription details - members of FoD are eligible for a 10% discount!

During the last decades, one after the other, the classical modernist designers have had their revivals. Austrian-born architect and designer Josef Frank, 1885–1967, is remarkable in this group. 

And, in August-September of this year, his architecture and design will be presented in Felles Haus, the Scandinavian embassy’s exhibition hall in Tiergarten, Berlin.

Josef Frank’s furniture and fabrics have been produced for more than eighty years by Stockholm-based Svenskt Tenn, a design and furnishings company, which started a collaboration with him in the 1930's. Remarkable also because he thought about human needs and interior design in philosophical terms: “A home must not primarily be an effective machine; it must offer comfort, rest and a nice atmosphere where the eye can rest and the mind be refreshed. No puritanical principles in a good interior”.

 Frank’s work became suddenly hot again in the mid-1980's when post-modernism reached its peak. His furniture, lamps and printed textiles were re-evaluated and explored by a new audience. Then around the turn of the new millennium, young design aficionados provided a boost for Frank’s work so that his reputation extended far beyond Sweden’s borders. The strength of his designs was also confirmed by Ballantyne Cashmere, who dressed the walls of their highly prestigious store in Milan with his “Brazil” pattern printed on linen.

Berlin was, in a way, the city where Frank’s work was first established when, in 1908–09, he began practice as an architect in the office of Bruno Möring, one of Berlin’s leading architects. Also in Berlin during this period were Charles Édouard Jeanneret (later to be known as Le Corbusier) and Mies van der Rohe, who worked in the office of Peter Behrens. It was then that Josef Frank met his Swedish wife, Anna Sebenius, whom he married three years later in Cologne, with Konrad Adenauer, mayor of the city, officiating at the marriage. Frank happened to be in Cologne because he had won the commission for the interior design and installations of the city’s new East Asian Museum.

Frank then continued his career in Vienna, where he designed some famous single-family homes and, in the beginning of the 1920's, also designed residential housing in larger complexes. Together with colleagues Oskar Strnad and Oskar Wlach, he established an office and shop for interior design, Haus und Garten, which very rapidly gained a good reputation among young liberal settlers.

Born in 1885 in Baden, while the family was spending a summer vacation there, Frank came from an assimilated Jewish middle-class family who lived in Vienna. He started his studies at the Vienna University of Technology in 1903, the same year that the Wiener Werkstätte was formed by Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser. Vienna was, at the time, a melting pot for modernity. Not far from his university was the Café Museum, designed by Adolf Loos. There, Frank and his young colleagues received additional tuition through all the inspiring discussions, not to mention the “café seminars”. Among the regular visitors were Josef Hoffman, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, J. M. Olbricht, Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg.

It was in Vienna that Josef Frank established himself as a practising architect. He started with two assignments. The first was the interior of ‘Die Schwedische Turnschule’, where Anna played the piano and which was owned by Esther Strömberg from Sweden. The other was given him by his sister Hedwig and her husband Karl Tedesco who, being recently married, had acquired an apartment in Vienna. Frank stamped their home with a bold look, dominated by the idea of uniting beauty and comfort. The triangular-shaped black-and-white patterned floor in their living room, which to a Stockholm audience became a precursor of the geometric surfacing of Sergels Torg (in the central city), was probably inspired by Italian renaissance architecture. The Tedesco home was reviewed by Oskar Wlach, who concluded that it did not have a style but was modern: “In one room, like the lounge, with an oriental rug, English table, Chinese lamp and a Swedish ceiling a rich harmony has been created which cannot be ruined by new additions”.

During the next years, Frank designed single-family houses and regularly participated in exhibitions of interior design arranged by the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. His “rooms” got very good reviews even in international magazines like the British “The Studio” and the Italian “Domus”. In the 1925 L’Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the interior designed by Josef Frank for Haus und Garten was noted as one of the most radical and simple in a positive sense, compared to the more luxurious French designs.

When the German Werkbund, with Mies van der Rohe as chief architect, organized the housing fair Die Wohnung in Stuttgart in 1927, leading architects, such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ernst May and Bruno Taut were invited to design the new modern living. Josef Frank was the only contributing architect from Austria. A striking poster created by Willy Baumeister, depicting a traditional bourgeois setting crossed over with two red lines, served as the invitation for the public to this presentation on the future in living styles. Frank designed a two-family house in strictly functional style, but the interior became the subject of much talk, drawing such comments as “Frank has designed a brothel!” The other participating architects were shocked. His use of textiles, cushions and upholstered sofas was a far cry from the orthodoxy preached by the Bauhaus school or the circles around Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit Nouveau.

Frank’s clients included some Swedes, relatives and friends of his wife Anna. In Falsterbo, in the south of Sweden, he designed a summer house in 1924 for her sister and brother-in-law. It was the first Swedish, so-called functional house. Two years later he got another commission in the same village and, altogether, he ended up designing five houses in Falsterbo. These Frank houses remain a local topic of discussion, and in the last decades they have started to attract visitors with an interest in architecture from around the whole world.

Frank also had Swedish clients who ordered furniture and textiles from Haus und Garten.

Around this time, in 1924 Stockholm Estrid Erikson established her company Svenskt Tenn, in collaboration with some Swedish designers who were creating modern designs in pewter – a material which was rediscovered in the 1920's. However, she soon came to see that although she loved pewter, her main interest was interior design. She had friends who had bought some very impressive dining chairs and table designed by Josef Frank. She had also seen his designs in international magazines. So she wrote to him, asking if he was interested in designing products for her company. As is well known, he never answered the letter.

But three or four years later times had changed. Anna Frank was appalled by the growing fascism and Nazism in Austria, particular in Vienna. Concurrently, they were facing an economic depression in the early 1930's. Around this time, Frank was having difficulties getting commissions, like many other of his colleagues. The Austrian Werkbund split into two factions. One included mainly Jewish architects; the other was led by Josef Hoffman, who now seemed to intimate that he didn’t much care for his Jewish colleagues. Yet, it would be perhaps too extreme to term him an anti-Semite, because during these years he had many Jewish clients, among them the powerful Wittgenstein family. Mostly, it was just that he was just not all that interested in politics or as concerned about the events of the day, as were so many others.

Anna had inherited some money in Sweden and therefore thought that they should try to find out if it was possible to live and work in Stockholm for a period. They left Austria in December 1933 and upon moving to Stockholm, Josef Frank immediately started working with Svenskt Tenn. By the autumn of 1934, “the couple” – Frank and Erikson – created a sensation with his large sofa which was presented in a Home exhibition in Liljewalchs Konsthall. The sofa was far too big for the average Swedish living room, nor did it fit into the ideas of good “folkhem”.

The collaboration between Josef Frank and Estrid Erikson went very well. She asked him to make new designs and always accepted his proposals. He was very productive, designed everything from furniture, lamps, metal works, and textile patterns to glass. During the first five years in Stockholm, he also frequently went to Vienna where he had clients and was a joint owner of the company Haus und Garten. However, after the Anschluss in March 1938, it was not possible any longer for the Jewish Frank to travel to Austria. And the company, Haus und Garten, was happily taken over by his producer of lamps, Julius Kalmár. Frank’s living-room in the Swedish pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York was reviewed as one of the best examples of “Swedish modern”. He was very pleased to have added a new spirit to the Swedish style.

When Hitler came to occupy Denmark and Norway in 1940, once again Anna Frank believed that it was too risky for them to remain in Sweden, so they moved to the USA to which his brother, Philipp, a professor in physics, had already emigrated in 1938. Josef Frank was invited to lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York. He had hoped to find American clients while in the USA, but it was not easy at a time when everything was focused on the war. Nevertheless, he started designing new textile patterns, inspired by the spirit of Manhattan and the current interest in folklore, especially Mexican. Some of his best and most loved textile designs, like Vegetable Tree, Vitamines, Drinks, Boston and Manhattan belong to this period.

Happily for Svenskt Tenn, Frank was not successful in finding American producers for his designs and after the war he and Anna returned to Stockholm. In the meantime, Estrid Erikson had married a sea captain, resulting in a minor change in the spelling of her surname to “Ericson”. She was, naturally, very pleased that their collaboration could now continue. Many of the patterns designed in America were printed in Sweden and Frank started again to design new furniture or redesign some of the models from Vienna. The National Museum of Stockholm invited him to put on a one-man show. Svenskt Tenn became, more than ever, an absolute haven for clients from all over the world who loved Josef Frank’s designs.

However, somewhat surprisingly, the Swedish architects didn’t welcome him as a famous colleague. After the houses he had designed in Falsterbo, he never again got a commission to design a building in Sweden. And he never kept company with Swedish architects. He loved it when visitors came to his home, which became a substitute for the café life in Vienna, with Anna constantly preparing pots of tea. He especially had many female friends, the most important of whom was Dagmar Grill, his wife’s younger cousin. He designed for her dream villas and, after Anna’s death, he lived there together with Dagmar for the last ten years of his life. He never returned to Vienna or Berlin. Even so, when the Jewish Museum of Vienna staged an exhibition of his work in November 2007, it was a success. Now his fame is returning to Berlin, the place where his professional career started.

Estrid Ericson died in 1981 and today Svenskt Tenn is owned by the Kjell and Märta Beijer Foundation, which promotes scientific research and the preservation of cultural and aesthetic values in the Swedish home interior design tradition.

The company is preserving their heritage and, more recently, has been more open-minded, inviting younger designers to add new ideas or to make some playful, humorous comments about Frank’s designs. Fruitful conversations with the master, which he, a humorous and warm-hearted man, either would have loved or commented on with very precise and sharp statements.

For Frank, there was no room for compromise in the quality of the artistic approach, process or product. He believed in the individual’s strength. And he was generous with advice:

– “In a home, modern rooms have white walls; that is the only chance one has to retain one’s freedom within it, and to introduce in it whatever one wishes. Against a white background one can let colors and patterns flourish; white beckons that which is beautiful and shuts out the trivial.”

– “It is easy to avoid every instance of a lack of taste if one restricts oneself to anemic asceticism and suppresses every expression of temperament. What is tasteful becomes desperately boring.”

– “An ornament must be a game, otherwise it is bad and offers the onlooker no peace.”

– “A monochrome surface is tiring; the more ornamentation, the more calming is the effect.”

– “The living room, where one can live and think freely, is neither beautifully harmonious nor homogenous. It has come about through coincidence, will never be complete and can within itself absorb whatever the residents’ varying needs may require.”

This Report is part of an article that was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Summer Issue 2008 Volume #6.

It was written by Hedvig Hedqvist.