"The Little Petra" by Viggo Boesen

This year's first Live Auction is just around the corner, and we are pleased to be able to present a large selection of Danish design on 10 March at 4 pm in Copenhagen. Most people associate "Danish Modern" with furniture from the heyday of 1949-1970, but at the auction we turn back the clock to the 1930s with two examples of “The Little Petra” chair, which the lesser-known architect Viggo Boesen designed in 1938. A funny anecdote says that Boesen named the chair after his mother-in-law Petra due to the chubby shape of the design. Originally the chair was made in a limited series by the cabinetmaker A.J. Iversen and was presented at the Cabinetmakers’ Guild Exhibition the same year and later in Berlin and New York. The offered chairs are from the cabinetmaker’s first production of the chair. They were bought by the current owner's family the same year they were made, and several old photographs show that the chairs have stood in the same place in the home where the current owner still lives.

With “The Little Petra”, one can clearly see that the furniture of the 1930s was heavier, rounder and more curved than the later more famous Danish design classics. There was a consensus among the architects in this earlier decade that the new ideas of the period concerning form, function and the use of new materials should not be achieved at the expense of people's needs and good craftsmanship. This is certainly true for the furniture from the 1930s, which with their soft, humane expression were among the first small attempts to create a distinctive Danish interpretation of international modernism.

Viggo Boesen contributed to this development in Danish furniture design. He graduated as an architect from the Royal Danish Art Academy's Furniture School in Copenhagen and began his career in the early 1930s, where he designed a series of upholstered furniture that placed themselves between international modernism and Nordic humanism. They were all designed based on his idea that furniture should have an organic flow, embrace the human body smoothly and comfortably and have a design that was pleasing to the eye. "The Little Petra" unites all of Boesen's thoughts concerning the perfect piece of furniture, and the original models are today highly sought after on the auction market.