CONTEMPORARY FURNITURE
The Answer is Risom
Jens Risom
Jens Risom: CONTEMPORARY FURNITURE [The Answer is Risom]. New York: Jens Risom Design, Inc., 1955. Original edition. Quarto. Silk screened and debossed paper covered boards. 82 pp. 154 photographs and 146 illustrations. Elaborate graphic design and multiple paper stocks throughout. Design and illustrations by John Kanelous, photography by Richard Avedon, Frank Finocchio, George Barrows and Hans Van Nes. 3-color folded Business Reply Card laid in. Brown boards lightly—and expectedly—worn at joints and edges. Risom Hollywood studio label to front pastedown. First few leaves of textblock lightly foxed, but a very good or better copy.
8.75 x 11.25 hardcover book with 82 pages of contemporary furniture designs by Jens Risom including sofas, chairs, tables, cabinets, chests, benches, and more, all “designed for today's living”—presented with 154 photographs and 146 line illustrations. All pieces are identified by name, dimensions and finishes illustrated with black and white product photography and measured specifications. All expected curatorial information present.
Jens Risom (Denmark, 1916 – 2016) came to the United States in the 1930's as a free-lance designer and later started his own firm for the design and manufacture of fine contemporary furniture. Unlike architect Alvar Aalto or Hans Wegner whose international influence remained rooted in Finland and Denmark respectively, Jens Risom emigrated from Europe to the U.S. when he was just 23 years of age. Like other Scandinavian designers such as Josef Frank and Kaare Klint, Risom continued to honor tradition in modern design, combining old and new in highly original ways.
Jens Risom’s career has spanned nearly sixty years. He began his study of design in the Copehagen workshop of Kaare Klint in 1935 and joined Ernst Kuhn’s architectural office in 1938, where he designed furniture and interiors. In 1939, Risom emigrated to the U.S. and in 1941 designed the first chair manufactured by Knoll. Risom described the chair as "very basic, very simple, inexpensive, easy to make." The chair was constructed with a birch wood frame and, because of wartime materials constraints, cheap but strong army surplus webbing and has inspired countless imitations.
Risom continued to create simple, well-crafted modern furniture with Knoll and George Jensen, but established his own design studio, Jens Risom Design, in 1946. The studio was acquired by Dictaphone in 1970 and in 1973, Risom became chief executive of Design Control, a Connecticut based design consultancy.
In the 1970's, he acted as a trustee of the Rhode Island School of Design. Now in his eighties, Jens Risom continues to be active and his work continues to reflect the Danish approach to modernism, with its emphasis on traditional values and the human need for warmth, beauty and simplicity. Modern American design owes much to his unfailing sense of proportion, commitment to practicality and insight into the forms of modern living.