THE LUNNING COLLECTION
Georg Jensen
Georg Jensen: THE LUNNING COLLECTION. New York City: Georg Jensen, 1957. First edition. Slim quarto. Photo illustrated stapled self wrappers. 16 pp. Fully illustrated in Black and white. Holiday sales catalog. Faint creae down the middle and minor shelf wear and a trace of foxing. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A very good copy. Rare.
6 x 8.5 well-illustrated staple-bound booklet: "Selected with an exacting eye focused upon originality, freshness, and artistry. These exclusive Christmas cards are designed to convey your most cordial holiday greetings."
Excerpted from Ginger Moro’s “The Mystery Designers For Georg Jensen USA on the website for JCKonline (June 1, 1996): The post-war perspective of the Jensen New York store changed drastically in 1949 when Lunning hired a new manager, a Dane named Kai Dessau. What had become an unwieldy general store selling mostly American-made merchandise was transformed into a trade center for Nordic handicraft and decorative art. Lunning was excited by the high quality and elegance of what in the ’50s came to be called Scandinavian Modern, and decided to supply moral and financial support. His Lunning Prize, a traveling scholarship to be awarded each year to two outstanding young Nordic craftsmen or industrial designers, was first presented on his 70th birthday, Dec. 21, 1951. The $400 awards were funded by profits from the New York Jensen shop sales.
The years of the Lunning Prize Foundation, 1951-1970, span the two remarkably fruitful decades of the Scandinavian Modern industrial and crafts design movement. Prize winners such as silversmith-jewelers Henning Koppel of Denmark, Greta Prytz Kittelsen of Norway, Torun Bulow-Hube of Sweden and Bjorn Weckstrom of Finland all later became internationally known. Ironically, Lunning died the year after establishing the prize - on Aug. 31, Georg Jensen’s birthdate!