The present chair, dating to 1935, is a rare survival from the now-lost interior of the Lolland Falsters Industri & Landbrugsbank (Industrial & Agricultural Bank) in the town of Nykøbing Falster, Falster Island, South Denmark. Its designer, Kaj Gottlob, professor of architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, belonged to the first generation of Danish architects to engage with functionalism, and his early partnership with cabinetmaker A.J. Iverson laid the foundations for the emergence of the seminal tradition of annual Copenhagen Cabinetmakers’ Guild exhibitions from 1927. Made to order for the bank, the chair is a rare piece, and in its materials, style, and design context, stands as an important early example of a specifically Danish adoption of international functionalist aesthetics.

Characteristic of Gottlob’s furniture, the chair is modelled on the ‘Klismos’ chair, a 700-400 BC ancient Greek armless style of chair with upturned legs. The ‘Klismos’ was central to the repertoires of Gottlob, Kaare Klint, Kaj Foster and other leading Danish designers in the years following the First World War, during which time a pared-down, modernist form of neoclassicism was the dominant national style in architecture and furniture. Less typical, however, is Gottlob’s refashioning of this classical archetype in nickel-plated steel and leather for the present chair, modern industrial materials which made their debut in Scandinavian design at the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition only a few years prior. So pioneering were Gottlob’s material choices in Denmark at the time that it appears that local manufacture was not an option for the bank’s furniture; rather, according to the label fixed to the base of the chair, its producer was DS Staal-Stel, a specialist steel furniture company based in Malmö, Sweden.

The first and only twentieth-century ‘Klismos’ chair to be composed of steel and leather, the present lot’s unusual status as an ancient form in industrial garb finds further explanation in the broader nature of the Lolland Falster commission. Designing the building’s exterior, interior and furnishings together, Gottlob was responsible for establishing a sense of corporate identity at the Industrial & Agricultural Bank, for which steel and leather, integrated in a powerful, legitimising classical design scheme, were well suited. As seen in a historical photograph of the box room in the bank vault for which the present chair was designed, Gottlob carried his holistic vision for the interior through the space by populating it with specially made furnishings. Indeed, in its cohesiveness, the now-forgotten building stands as a pioneering example of Danish total design, an approach more closely associated with the work of one of his pupils, Arne Jacobsen, from the 1940s onwards.

Larger scheme aside, what makes the present chair singularly compelling is the distinctive treatment of the steel elements. Quite unlike the kind of bent tubular steel furniture produced by Bauhaus designers and shown at the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, Gottlob’s chair, with its precisely welded and finely shaped solid steel frame, evokes the process of a cabinetmaker tackling metal as if it were wood. Such a method, embracing the fabric of modernism whilst honouring the Danish tradition of exquisite craftsmanship above all else, prefigures the work of Poul Kjærholm and others designing some fifteen to twenty years later, likely unfamiliar with Gottlob’s unassuming yet salient work at the bank in Nykøbing Falster.