Simple, minimal, curvy and Canadian
Gardiner Museum exhibit uncovers deep Nordic roots in our national identity
As holiday shoppers on the hunt for the perfect gift understand all too well, our choices are meaningful. The things we give and get are expressions of what we care about and aspire to, which is why they offer us a window into ourselves.
This is the underlying subject of the exhibit True Nordic: How Scandinavian Design Influenced Canada at the Gardiner Museum until Jan. 5, when it heads to museums across the country. In True Nordic, curators Rachel Gotlieb and Michael Prokopow use examples of Canadian-designed objects and furnishings to offer the Scandinavian back story of our national identity.
True Nordic features more than100 works of furniture, textiles, lighting, porcelain, silver and glass objects, and the surprise for the visitor is that all are designed and/or crafted by Canadians, as they share what has come to be widely understood as a “Scandinavian” design esthetic. As Gotlieb describes it, “modern and functional, made in natural materials, with gentle curves, rough or smooth surfaces, and often, although not always, evoking imagery from nature.”
The spine that runs through the show is a curving wall that recalls Alvar Aalto’s influential Finnish pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. This 2003 version by Vancouver-based design and production studio molo, however, which was chosen by the curators and show’s designer Andrew Jones, a softwall system of pleated brown kraft paper offers a serpentine-like backdrop. As a reference, it’s on point: while Canada struggles with its own national design identity, the warm, yet restrained modernism that came to define the postwar style of our Northern neighbours proved iconic and resonated so strongly with Canadians that it continues to influence Canadian designers working today.
Struggling back in 1964 to come up with a design image that reflected Canadian style, our national representation at the XIII Milan Triennale was an open-concept “Canadian cottage” of blond wood and glass with clean-lined furnishings
“There is a sense of lightness and openness about it . . . that isn’t grand, but speaks to an emerging middle class.” RACHEL GOTLIEB GARDINER MUSEUM CURATOR
that could have come out of a Scandinavian pavilion (and would still embody the fantasy of urban hipsters today).
As the show takes pains to illustrate, the first wave of Scandinavian design influence arrived here in Canada in the 1920s and ’30s via Scandinavian-born emigrés, such as Karen Bulow, Thor Hansen, Carl Poul Petersen and Erica and Kjeld Deichmann, many of whom who had learned techniques of pottery-making, weaving and silversmithing in the Sloyd traditions of their native countries.
What is fascinating is how much we romanticized the wholesome Northernness of these makers, who were portrayed as early hipsters — in the case of Deichmann, pictured bare- foot at the potters wheel alongside his fine-boned wife in one of several National Film Board films about the family, as if they were a decorative arts version of the von Trapps. Or the charismatic, beret-clad Hansen, promoting the benefits of craft to both the culture and the soul on a crosscountry lecture circuit.
And yet there is something soul-cleansing in the presence of such gems as Mariette Rousseau-Vermette’s magnificent, colossal 1961 weaving, Hiver Canadien, which runs along the back wall of the gallery like an enormous Group of Seven mural.
“There was this sense that from a design perspective, we should be more like the Scandinavian countries,” Gotlieb says, adding that along with sharing a northern climate, we also share a certain sensibility if not a set of values. “There is a sense of lightness and openness about it, something appealing in its materiality that isn’t grand, but speaks to an emerging middle class with its attitude of progressive modernity.”
Indeed, the idea that Scandinavian forms represented “good” design was actively promoted by Canadian cultural elites, so much so that by the ’50s and ’60s, contemporary housewares and furnishings designed and manufactured in Kitchener or Montreal were often marketed under deliberately Nordic-sounding brands such as Danesco and Scanmor, as demonstrated by a display of massmarket packaging.
Also represented are these influences at the high end of the market, with a set of Poul Petersen’s silver for Birks from the Bronfmans’ collection.
A fine example of the G2 stereo cabinet for Clairtone, founded by Peter Munk, still looks visionary. And the prototype of Janis Kravis’ hoop-shaped leather-and-wood chairs for the tony Three Small Rooms at Toronto’s Windsor Arms hotel offers a nostalgic reminder of the old, European inflected Yorkville. Kravis, of course, was the design mind behind the much-venerated Karelia, a modern home furnishings shop that stocked Marimekko fabrics just blocks away from the Windsor Arms on St. Thomas St. — a corner that was also once home to George Jensen and the Danish food centre.
Those institutions may be long gone, but their influence is still strong, as the show illustrates in its section devoted to contemporary Canadian practice. Standouts include the Brothers Dressler’s antlerlike 2009 Branches chandelier and Torbjorn Anderssen’s long-necked 2014 copper watering can from Mjolk.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the show as we head into the 150th anniversary of confederation is how little we have valued Canadian designs and design here in Canada.
None of our major museums collect Canadian design; many of the objects in the show were acquired through the few existing private collections. One Bostlund lamp on display was found by the curators at Value Village for the princely sum of $5. Given how little we prize and promote our own — in sharp contrast to our Nordic neighbours, who have made design their calling card throughout the world — it is little wonder that150 years in, the struggle to articulate our identity continues.