On a September evening in 1960, Americans sat in darkened living rooms, transfixed by their flickering television screens. It was the first night of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates, and we all know the takeaway image: a haggard Richard Nixon stands at a lectern, glistening with sweat, while John Kennedy, seated with leg suavely crossed at the knee, is cool and calm in a Danish-modern chair. Scholars still argue whether that scene changed the outcome of the election. It is a fact, however, that the Danish chair, designed by Hans Wegner, became so well known that it was marketed in the U.S. as “The Chair.”
The debate and the chair form a touchstone that reminds us just how deeply Scandinavian design has penetrated American culture. On October 9, “Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890–1980” opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), co-organized by Bobbye Tigerman, a curator of decorative arts and design at LACMA, and Monica Obniski, who was curator of 20th- and 21st-century design at the Milwaukee Art Museum when she worked on the show. (She’s now at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta.) The exhibition uses 175 objects, from doilies to automobiles, to map out the relationship between American and Scandinavian design over the course of a century.
