Selling Time: Multiple Temporalities in the Promotion of Danish Design Classics

The promotion of design classics was established in Denmark in the 1960s, turning Danish Modern into a tradition, and today it is carried out through institutionalized discourses and multiple temporalities, as we show in the cases of the Wishbone Chair and the Vipp brand. There has been much critique of the canonization of design classics, but little research literature on the concept itself, compared to related concepts such as icons or retro. Drawing on theories from design historiography, sociology, material culture studies and the hermeneutic philosophy of history to examine ageing objects, temporal values and non-synchronicity, these cases sketch multiple layers of temporality, offering very different experiences and values depending on how much engagement, knowledge and time the consumer might be able to invest. That classics are mainly praised as timeless objects stands against a promotion loaded with temporal layers of age, memory and history.

The Influence of German Tubular Steel on Soviet Furniture at the VKhUTEMAS, 1927–1930

This article looks at the influence of German tubular steel furniture at the State Higher Art and Technical Workshops (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow during the late 1920s. Tubular steel furniture was first introduced in 1925 at the Bauhaus and within a few years was perceived by progressive architects across Europe as the appropriate material for the modernist interior. While the Soviet Union sought to revive its industrial economy during the New Economic Policy (1921–28), VKhUTEMAS students and professors looked to Europe for technical and artistic guidance for the design of new furniture as the country became a socialist society. German design innovations reached Moscow through the dissemination of print material, international exhibitions, and travel, including student exchanges between the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS. Between 1927–30 VKhUTEMAS students Boris Zemliannitsyn and Alexandr Galaktionov designed new furniture that referenced German tubular steel furniture, while professors El Lissitzky and Moisei Ginzburg replicated German tubular steel designs in their models and renditions of standard proletariat dwellings. Although the Soviet economy could not support widespread steel manufacturing, the experimentation with tubular steel furniture at VKhUTEMAS highlighted the international influence of German modernism and exposed the derivative nature of Soviet socialist material culture.

A Dentist’s Chair: For Practicality, Comfort, or Spectacle?

This essay focuses on a thirteen-inch-high reclining chair with a carved walnut frame, brass base, and emerald green velvet upholstery in the Winterthur Museum collection [1 and 2]. Created by Ira Salmon of Boston circa 1866, the chair is a patent model and part of Salmon’s efforts to win a professional reputation as a dentist early in his career. This essay documents the transformation of dentistry in America from an itinerant practice in the early republic to a professionalized career in the mid-nineteenth century. It offers evidence of how the material world of dentists changed when tools of the profession became standardized and mass produced. Developing technologies facilitated reclining chairs suited for newfangled operative techniques. The essay also focuses on a period that anticipates the development of germ theory in the early twentieth century and the sterilization of the dentist’s office. In this mid-nineteenth century moment, the aesthetics of dentist offices, and their chairs’ designs, bridge a divide between the traditional values associated with dentists and those ascribed to dentists today. The patent model demonstrates Salmon’s desire to appeal to his clients’ interest by capturing the dramatic potential of a dentist’s visit while satisfying their desire for comfort and expectation of skilful technique. Olivia Armandroff is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California. She works on early- to mid-twentieth-century American art. She holds a B.A. from Yale University in History and the History of Art where she wrote and later published a senior thesis on how the early-twentieth-century phenomenon for individualized bookplates. Before coming to USC, she was the John Wilmerding Intern for American Art at the National Gallery of Art and then earned an M.A. in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program where her master’s thesis was dedicated to the early twentieth-century, New York salon of Muriel Draper. Olivia has curated exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, Sterling Memorial Library, the Delaware Art Museum, and the American Swedish Historical Museum and has contributed to exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.