Name: Poul Henningsen Danish Mid-Century Cinema Chair
Brand: Poul Henningsen
Price: 1520 USD
Availability: InStock

Poul Henningsen Danish Mid-Century Cinema Chair

View Similar Items

Poul Henningsen, Pair of Foldable Theatre Chairs for the Betty Nansen Theatre, 1

Mid-Century Oak Dining Chairs by Poul Volther for FDB Mobler , Denmark, 1960s

Danish Mid-Century Chair

Mid-Century Modern Danish Set of Six Chairs in Rosewood by Poul Hundevad

Poul Volther Danish Oak Lounge Chair

Frits Henningsen Danish Highback Lounge Chair, c. 1940's

Poul Jensen for Selig Mid-Century Walnut Z Lounge Chair

Mid-Century Modern Danish Lounge Chair

Danish Mid-Century Walnut Dining Chair

Mid-Century Danish Chair in Walnut

Sculptural Danish Mid-Century Modern Chair, Denmark ca 1960s

Mid Century Danish Teak Side Chairs, a Pair

Shop All Poul Henningsen

Poul Henningsen

The name Poul Henningsen is synonymous with the best and most innovative modern Scandinavian lamps and other lighting. The Danish designer created a signature vocabulary of fixtures with tiered and layered shades in sculptural arrangements that are at once naturalistic and geometric.

Henningsen grew up in a town on the outskirts of Copenhagen and studied architecture at the Technical University of Denmark. He would become a noted art critic, journalist and screenwriter, but his first love was lighting design.

Henningsen’s childhood home was illuminated by oil lamps. When his family switched to electrified lighting, he was alarmed and repelled by the harsh glare cast by an incandescent bulb, and in his late teens he began conducting quasi-scientific experiments to measure which materials and methods best diffused or reflected light to give it a warm brightness. His work came to the attention of the lighting-fixtures firm Louis Poulsen, which sponsored the development of a prototype lamp. The design won a gold medal at the 1925 Paris Expositions Internationales des Arts Decóratifs et Industriels Modernes — from which the term Art Deco derives. The lamp, whose three-part shade is said to be inspired by the arrangement of a dinner plate atop a soup bowl atop a teacup, became the basis for Henningsen’s most successful design, the PH 4/3 desk lamp.

All told, Henningsen would design some 100 lighting fixtures in his career. Some of his most notable creations are hanging lamps, which include the Septima (1929), a pendant composed of seven graduated frosted-glass layers; the Spiral (1942), made of a single ribbon of enameled aluminum; and the Artichoke lamp (1958), whose 70 glass or metal fins in a staggered and graduated arrangement on a central steel frame resemble those of its namesake. The last is likely Henningsen’s masterwork and an icon of mid-20th-century design. Like all Henningsen lighting designs, it is striking, sculptural and — thanks to his insistence on the primacy of the quality of the light cast — superbly functional.

Find a collection of authentic Poul Henningsen table lamps, floor lamps and other lighting on 1stDibs.