Kaare Klint
Kaare Klint (1888 – 1954) was a Danish architect and furniture designer, known as the grandfather of modern Danish furniture design. His style was epitomized by clean, pure lines, the use of the best quality of materials and extraordinary craftsmanship. In 1914 Klint designed his first piece of furniture the Faaborg Chair for Carl Petersen's Faaborg Museum. Klint went on to create furniture and fittings for a number of other museums. From 1921 to 1926 he was responsible for the conversion of Frederiks Hospital, founded by King Frederik V, into the Danish Museum of Art & Design (today: Designmuseum Denmark) together with Thorkild Henningsen (1884-1931) and Ivar Bentsen (1876-1943). In 1927 Klint also created a chair in mahogany exclusively for the museum which was inspired by English 18th-century chairs.
His belief was that form had been perfected throughout history, and that there was no need to reinvent it. He thought that the basic proportions of a chair, for example, had already been refined, and he opposed what some of his European counterparts were trying to do in the Bauhaus movement. Rather than reinventing the chair, he believed one could add modernity to it in terms of shape, line, and then eventually materials, although he was essentially a traditionalist on the materials side of things too.
Kaare Klint was the son of the equally influential architect Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint (1853-1939) whose monumental Grundvig’s Church he completed after his father's death in 1930. Klint was also one of the founders of the furniture school at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1924.