Kaare Klint Biography - Infos for Sellers and Buyers

Kaare Klint

Fredericksberg 1888 - Kopenhagen 1954

The Danish designer and architect Kaare Klint was born in Fredericksberg in 1888, where he studied painting at the Polytechnic until 1903 before training under his father, the architect P.V. Jensen Klint. Kaare Klint subsequently worked in the architecture practice of Kai Nielsen and Carl Petersen. With Carl Petersen, Kaare Klint co-designed the 1914 "Faborg" chair in the Neo-Classical style for the Faborg Museum owned by the art collector Mads Rasmussen.
From 1917 Kaare Klint was self-employed as a designer, working for the firms Fritz Hansen and Rudolf Rasmussen. In 1924 Kaare Klint became director of the recently founded furniture school at the Copenhagen Art Academy, where he was also a professor of architecture from 1944. In 1933 Kaare Klint the wooden "Deck" chair with a fold-out support for the feet. That same year he designed the "Safari" chair.
As a teacher especially, Kaare Klint exerted a strong influence. With his students, he studied how a piece of furniture was to function and took anthropometric measurements. As a design theorist, Kaare Klint looked back to the crafts tradition and skilled craftsmanship, for which meticulous attention to detail and a knowledge of materials were essential. This was the basis on which new forms were to be created from existing forms that had proved their worth, not a radical break with tradition but rather an evolution.
Kaare Klint's teachings formed the theoretical basis for the renewal of Danish design after 1945.