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Verner Panton
- Wholesale Designer Furniture
Verner Panton (13 February
1926 – 5 September 1998) is considered one of Denmark's most
influential 20th-century furniture and interior
designers. During his career, he created innovative and
futuristic designs in a variety of materials, especially
plastics, and in vibrant
colors. His style was very "1960s" but regained
popularity at the end of the 20th century; as of 2004, Panton's
most well-known furniture
models are still in production.
Panton was trained as an architectural engineer in
Odense; next, he studied architecture at the Royal Danish
Academy of Art (Det Kongelige
Danske Kunstakademi) in Copenhagen, graduating in 1951.
During the first two years of his career, 1950-1952, he worked
at the
architectural practice of Arne Jacobsen, another Danish
architect and furniture designer. Panton turned out to be an
"enfant terrible" and
he started his own design and architectural office. He
became well known for his innovative architectural proposals,
including a
collapsible house (1955), the Cardboard House and the
Plastic House (1960). Near the end of the 1950s, his chair
designs became more and
more unconventional, with no legs or discernible back. In
1960 Panton was the designer of the very first single-form
injection-moulded
plastic chair. The Stacking chair or S chair, which would
become his most famous and mass-produced design.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Verner Panton
experimented with designing entire environments: radical and
psychedelic interiors that
were an ensemble of his curved furniture, wall
upholstering, textiles and lighting. He is best known for the
design of a German boats
interior, now a famous museum. He is also known for a
hotel in Europe that utilized circular patterns and cylindrical
furniture.
Additionally, Panton is well-known for his innovative
design work for Der Spiegel, a well-known German publication in
Hamburg.
VERNER PANTON (1926-1998) was a master of the fluid,
futuristic style of 1960s design which introduced the Pop
aesthetic to furniture and
interiors. Born in Denmark, he made his name there before
settling in Switzerland in the 1960s.
During the ‘Beat’ years of the mid-1950s, young European
artists and writers bought battered old camper vans to travel
across the
continent. One of the oddest-looking of these vans was
the Volkswagen belonging to Verner Panton, a young Danish
architect, who had
customised it into a mobile studio.
Every few months, Panton set off from Copenhagen in the
Volkswagen for a trek across Europe dropping in on fellow
designers as well as any
manufacturers or distributors which he hoped would buy
his work. Famed like the rest of Scandinavia for its organic
modernist designs,
Denmark was then at the centre of the contemporary design
scene. Yet Verner Panton’s style could not have been more
different from the
soft, naturalistic forms and materials which were the
hallmarks of Danish modernism. He knew that he would have to
look further afield to
win acceptance for his work.
Panton had close links with many of the most important
Danish designers of that era. Pøul Henningsen, the lighting
designer, had
taught him at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Art. After
graduating, he had worked for Denmark’s architectural grandee,
Arne Jacobsen. Panton
also enjoyed a close friendship with designer-craftsman,
Hans Wegner. But whereas Wegner was famed for his skill at
modernising classic Danish teak chairs, Panton’s passion lay in
experiments with plastics and other rapidly advancing man-made
materials to create vibrant
colours in the geometric forms of Pop Art.
Nothing in Verner Panton’s childhood suggested that he
might become a designer. Born in 1926 to innkeeper parents in
Gantofte, a tiny
village on the island of Fünen, he longed to become a
artist, but showed little talent for painting or drawing.
Despite this, he won a
place at the technical college in Odense, the largest
town on the island, in 1944. Denmark was then occupied by the
Germans and Panton
joined the resistance. Towards the end of World War II,
he spent several months in hiding after a cache of weapons was
found in his
room. After completing his studies in Odense, Panton
moved to Copenhagen in 1947 to enrol as an architecture student.
Meeting Pøul Henningsen at the Royal Academy of Art,
introduced Panton to product design. Best known for his bold,
abstract lighting,
Henningsen had a crisp, clean, unapologetically
industrial aesthetic which appealed to Panton. (In 1950, Panton
married Henningsen’s
step-daughter, Tove Kemp, but soon split up from her). An
equally important influence was Arne Jacobsen, whom Panton
assisted from 1950 to 1952 on various projects including the
famous 1951-52 Ant Chair.
Panton later claimed he had "learned more from him than
anyone else". Behind the gentle elegance of Jacobsen’s work lay
obsessive research
in new materials and technologies which inspired Panton.
After leaving Jacobsen, Panton eked out a living from
freelance design and architectural commissions, notably a
patented shirt ironed with a
rotary iron. He used the proceeds of that patent to buy
his Volkswagen van. In 1955, Fritz Hansen began production of
Panton’s Bachelor Chair
and Tivoli Chair. But it was not until the Cone Chair’s
introduction in 1959 that Panton came into his own with a truly
distinctive style.
A thinly padded conical metal shell placed point-down on
a cross-shaped metal base, the Cone was originally designed for
Komigen,
his parents’ new restaurant on Fünen. A Danish
businessman, Percy von Halling-Koch, spotted it at the opening
and offered to put it into production for Panton. When it was
photographed for Mobilia, the
Danish design magazine, in 1961, Panton draped naked shop
mannequins and models on the chairs, which caused a minor
scandal. The Cone Chair even attracted controversy in New York,
after the police ordered that
it be removed from a shop window where large crowds had
gathered to see it.
Having made his name as a visionary designer, Panton was
given license to experiment. He developed the first inflatable
furniture – made from
transparent plastic film – in 1960 as well as a "total
environment" for the Astoria Hotel at Trondheim in Norway where
the walls, floors
and ceilings were covered in an Op Art-inspired pattern
in variations of the same colour. This was the precursor to the
later, more
fantastical "total environments" which Panton was to
create at the Hamburg headquarters of Spiegel magazine in 1969,
for the Visiona II
exhibition at the 1970 Cologne Furniture Fair (the centre
of which was a vividly coloured cave-like space for reclining)
and for Grüner &
Jahr’s publishing offices in Hamburg in 1973.
Tiring of Denmark, Panton moved to Cannes in 1962, but
settled in Basel the following year with his future wife,
Marianne
Person-Oertenheim. There he began a long collaboration
with Vitra, the European licensee of Herman Miller, the US
furniture maker. They
launched the Flying Chair, a playful piece of fantasy
furniture, which was the hit of the 1964 Cologne Furniture Fair,
and developed the 1967
Panton Chair, the first cantilevered chair made from a
single piece of plastic. Sleek, sexy and a technical first, the
Panton was the chair
of the era. A glossy red Panton featured in Nova
magazine’s 1970 shoot in which a model demonstrated "How to
undress in front of your
husband".
Although he won numerous awards during the 1970s, Panton
gradually lost his place at the centre of the design scene. In
the cynical
post-Vietnam era, the politicised designs of Alessandro
Mendini and Gaetano Pesce, seemed more salient than Panton’s
playfully optimistic
faith in Pop and technology. Whereas other designers of
his generation, notably Ettore Sottsass, revitalised their work
and ideas
by reaching out to younger collaborators, Verner Panton
appeared increasingly isolated in self-imposed Swiss exile.
All that changed in the mid-1990s, when mid-20th century
modernism in general - and Verner Panton in particular -
returned to vogue. Graphic
designer Peter Saville chose a 1964 Shell Lamp as the
centrepiece of his much-photographed apartment in London’s
Mayfair. A 1995 cover of
British Vogue featured a naked Kate Moss on a Panton
Chair. Panton won yet more awards, his 1960s pieces were put
back into production and he
was invited to design an exhibition, Verner Panton: Light
and Colour, at Trapholdtmuseum in Kolding, Denmark. The
exhibition opened as
planned on 17 September 1998, but Verner Panton had died
in Copenhagen 12 days earlier.
Born in Gamtofte on the island of Fünen, Denmark to
innkeeper parents.
1944 Moves to Odense, also on Fünen, to enrol at the
Technical College. Becomes involved with the Danish resistance
against the
German occupation.
1947 Starts an architecture degree at Copenhagen’s Royal
Academy of Arts.
1950 As an assistant to the architect, Arne Jacobsen,
works on the Ant Chair.
1955 Fritz Hansen launches Panton’s first mass-produced
pieces of furniture, the Tivoli Chair and Bachelor Chair.
1957 Designs a self-assembly weekend home to be sold as a
limited edition.
1958 Opening of Komigen restaurant, designed by Panton
for his parents, is an instant hit, as is the Cone Chair he
created for it.
1960 Develops first inflatable chair and designs the
Astoria Hotel in Norway.
1961 Panton’s furniture, textiles and lights published in
Mobilia’s "Black Book".
1963 Moves to Basel (after a short stint in Cannes) with
Marianne Person-Oertenheim. Begins collaboration with Herman
Miller-Vitra in
Basel.
1964 Flying Chairs and Shell Lamps create a furore at
Cologne Furniture Fair.
1965 Unveils S Chair, first cantilevered moulded plywood
chair, for Thonet. Starts work on the Panton Chair with Herman
Miller-Vitra
launched in 1968.
1969 Living Towers unveiled in Paris. Spiegel
headquarters completed.
1970 Designs fantastical Visiona II exhibition for Bayer
at Cologne Fair.
1973 Completes work on the interior of Grüner & Jahr’s
offices in Hamburg.
1990 Vitra puts the Panton Chair back into production.
1994 IKEA produces Panton’s Vilbert Chair as the Panton
revival takes off.
1995 Panton Chair appears on the cover of British Vogue.
1998 Verner Panton dies in Copenhagen 12 days before the
opening of his Light and Colour retrospective at the
Trapholtmuseum in Kolding,
Denmark.
2000 Verner Panton: Light and Colour opens at Vitra
Design Museum,
Weil-am-Rhein, and the Design Museum.
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