Gardiner Museum's new show explores Scandinavian-inspired Canadian design

There was a time in Canada when the idea of having modern furniture in the home was as repugnant as pouring Cheez Whiz on ice cream. The prevailing aesthetic, writes Gardiner Museum director Kelvin Browne, was led by the country's colonial roots, i.e., ersatz Chippendale or faux French.

But there was an exception, and it's explored in the Gardiner's excellent new show: True Nordic: How Scandinavia Influenced Design in Canada, which features ceramics, furniture, lighting and textiles. Scandinavian-inspired, Canadian-made design, writes Brown in the exhibit's accompanying book, was "the Trojan Horse of contemporary," surreptitiously sneaking sleek teak tables, credenzas and chairs into otherwise respectably unmodern homes.

Part of the appeal was that unlike other forms of modernism, the output from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland wasn't frigidly functional, like so many glass-and-steel office towers. The wood had warmth, the craftsmanship was impeccable and the lines weren't monotonously straight. There were also bursts of colour, particularly in the pottery and textiles (Marimekko's exuberant poppy prints, say). In short, it was humane.

Dr. Rachel Gotlieb and Dr. Michael Prokopow are both historians and the show's curators. They worked on the exhibit on and off for eight years, collecting the pieces from a wide range of sources, including private collections, other museums, even Value Village. They explain that the roots of Scandinavian design in Canada date back to the 1920s, when emigrants from Northern Europe brought their traditional techniques and craftsmanship. It helped that Canada, with a similar climate and geography, offered access to a complimentary palette of natural materials.

Prokopow points to someone such as Carl Poul Petersen as an early example. He was born in Copenhagen and apprenticed under famed Danish silversmith Georg Jensen before moving to Canada. An extravagant tea service he designed for the Bronfman family between 1930 and 1945, on loan from the McCord Museum, is one of the show's highlights. "If you look closely you will see how Petersen was blending his Danish sensibility with his Canadian influence," Prokopow says. "There are maple leafs circling the handles."

Aside from immigration, international exhibitions brought the latest flavours. At the 1939 World's Fair in New York, for example, the Finnish pavilion, by architect Alvar Aalto caused a sensation with its sinuous, swooping forms. "Designers and the design-educated public paid attention to the World's Fair, and the coverage in the press," Gotlieb says. "The influence started showing up in Canadian designs. And still does. It would be impossible to look at something such as the Integral House designed by [Toronto-based architects] Shim-Sutcliffe, and not see the influence of Aalto."

Some of the pieces are, in fact, so similar to original Nordic designs that they almost seem like copies. A bent plywood chair, manufactured in 1946 by the Canadian Wooden Aircraft Company in Stratford, Ont., looks eerily like an earlier (though frankly far better) design by Aalto. Others were even closer copies. A set of candlesticks manufactured by Quebec's Baribocraft almost perfectly mirror ones made by Dansk. "The originals were probably teak," Prokopow says. "Baribocraft made theirs from maple."

But as time went on, the influence became less direct. "It's remarkable," Gotlieb says, "that in a country as vast as Canada, with so many regional differences, where there hadn't been a dominant design school, Scandinavian became the prevalent aesthetic." And once we embraced it, we keep going with it. "It's interesting," Prokopow says, "because many designers in Northern Europe consider modern Scandinavian design a yoke. They want to move on from it. Whereas it still has a huge influence here."

The show culminates with a selection of pieces by top contemporary Canadian designers. Entirely original works that simply echo the craftsmanship, attention to detail and materiality of the modern Scandinavians. There's nothing ersatz about the work of someone such as Vancouver's Omer Arbel, whose milky glass pendant lights cascade from the ceiling like ethereal beings floating from the sky. His pieces might tap into a bigger, longer tradition but are confidently, proudly his own.

True Nordic is at the Gardiner in Toronto until Jan. 8, when it will be moving to the New Brunswick Museum and then the Vancouver Art Gallery.