CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/14/2025

A new book on Hans J. Wegner's remarkable watercolors

No one did chairs better than midcentury Danish furniture designer Hans J. Wegner. That concept is pretty well established. But it turns out, very few industrial designers could render in the unforgiving medium of watercolor as finely as Wegner, either. Pictured here, from new release Watercolors by Hans J. Wegner, out now from Strandberg Publishing, are his designs for a chair and bench with armrests, submitted to the Museum of Modern Art’s International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design in 1948. “We have to move forward. We cannot say that we only want to work in the old materials. There might be something new to be gained,” Wegner is quoted from 1974. “He was not afraid to think innovatively, including in terms of materials,” author Anne Blond writes. “In his chair designs submitted for the [MoMA] competition, Wegner used molded plywood, a light, industrially processed and cheap material. Wegner’s MoMA chairs never went into production, but they did serve as the starting point for his later shell chairs, including the Tripartite Chair from 1949 and the even more famous Shell Chair from 1963.”