Ingegerd Torhamn
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a modernist painted and decorated chest of drawers, Sweden ca 1930.
The sides and the top lacquered in black, the front in greyish green with an abstract modern, geometrical motif, nine different sized drawers with white metal handles. The reverse marked 'Formgivning och dekor av Ingegerd Torhamn (18)98 12 27 - 0420'. Height 166 cm, width 100 cm, depth 60 cm.
Provenance
The Torhamn family.
Bukowskis' auction in 2015, sale 587, lot 467.
More information
Ingegerd Torhamn (1898-1994)
Ingegerd Torhamn was inspired by the contemporary abstract modernist art at the time, in the 1920-30s. Ahead of the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition she went to the director of the exhibition, Gunnar Asplund and was showing some of her scetches for rugs. Asplund much appreciated the concept and told Ingegerd Torhamn to have the carpets made after those drawings. At the exhibition the carpets were placed into some of the different architects' interiors. Today these carpets are what Torhamn is most recognized for. Especially well-known from different photographs is the rug that was put into the architect Sven Markelius' house.
The textiles of Ingegerd Torhamn are more related to contemporary art at the time, rather than to the textiles that otherwise was produced in Sweden. Torhamn and her husband Gunnar had taken part of the international art scene when spending quite some time in Paris in the mid 1920's. This period inspired her a great deal. In the late 1920's Torhamn went to Berlin and the Bauhaus. She saw Breuer's tubular steel pieces of furniture and so much liked them that she brought a few of them back home. She said at some stage that 'I was made for the modernism (funktionalism), it is like I have always waited for this to come'. Her textile oeuvre has sometimes been compared with the suprematistic art of the Russian Malevitj, sometimes they have been called 'purist'. However, she was more or less neglected by her fellow artists and art historians at the time.
The Torhamn couple seem to have been good at their interior decorating wherever they lived with their family, though it is very unlikely that she did create any other pieces of furniture of this dignity.