Josef Frank
Svenskt Tenn's colourful designer.
Josef Frank fled from Vienna to Stockholm in 1933 and worked for Svenskt Tenn. His patterns of flowers and animals are a counterpoint to the austerity of functionalism.
Josef Frank was born in 1885 in Baden near Vienna into a Jewish family. He studied architecture at the Technical University in Vienna and wrote a doctoral thesis on the Renaissance architect Alberti. In the 1920s he was a leading modernist in Vienna, designing municipal housing and teaching. In 1925 he and a colleague founded the interior design firm Haus & Garten.
Frank took part in the famous Weissenhof housing exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927 and led the Werkbundsiedlung in Vienna in 1932. But he soon grew critical of dogmatic functionalism. He argued that a home should not be a machine but a place where people could feel at ease, with objects from different periods, soft furniture and colourful textiles. He later wrote a much-discussed essay on an architecture based on accident, as a counterpoint to rigid systems.
His wife Anna was Swedish, and in 1933 the couple moved to Stockholm to escape antisemitism. The following year he began working for Estrid Ericson and her firm Svenskt Tenn. The collaboration lasted more than thirty years and produced thousands of drawings for furniture, lamps and objects as well as a large number of textile patterns. He became a Swedish citizen in 1939.
During the Second World War Frank spent a few years in New York, where he taught and drew many of his most famous patterns. The patterns are dense and colourful, with flowers, birds, fruit and trees from all over the world, often inspired by botanical books. The furniture is comfortable, light and often upholstered in his fabrics. He combined English, Chinese and Viennese traditions with modern simplicity.
Josef Frank died in Stockholm in 1967. Svenskt Tenn still sells his furniture and textiles, and his patterns have become part of Swedish home furnishing. Today he is seen as one of the most important figures in the history of Svenskt Tenn and as an early critic of an overly strict modernism.