RISOM CONTEMPORARY FURNITURE CATALOG
1958 SUPPLEMENT set
Jens Risom
Jens Risom: RISOM CONTEMPORARY FURNITURE CATALOG 1958 SUPPLEMENT. New York: Jens Risom Design, Inc. November 1958. Original edition. Four pieces, featuring 1958 Supplement: stapled printed wrappers. 54 pp. Fully illustrated with photographs and line art. Designed by John Kanelous. Photography by Richard Avedon. Faint offsetting to front cover. Price List: stapled printed self wrappers. 24 pp. Furniture specifications and prices. Memo: printed memo on Jens Risom letterhead, with paper clip divot to top edge. Envelope: Matching mailing envelope with typed recipient name and offsetting from storage, thus a nearly fine set.
[2] 8.375 x 11 stapled booklets [54/ 24] pp. with Printed memo housed in the original mailing envelope; llustrated 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.