Slagelse Sofa 185  

@leif ericson - Zephyr Renner

@Herringbone

The sofa is documented in the archive on Nanna Ditzel's website. And it's called "Allé" sofa.

http://www.nanna-ditzel-design.dk/archive.html

@mvc I seriously doubt that is correct.  I guess I would want to know what what documentation Dennie Ditzel has that the Slagelse 185 was designed by Nanna.  

@leif ericson - Zephyr Renner

This is, of course, a fundamental problem when we start to question what family members are saying. As a consequence, we risk to come to the point that we can no longer believe anyone who cannot prove at least a "notarial certification". Dennie Ditzel worked with her mother for many years, so actually you can assume that she knows exactly what her parents' collection is. And for what reason should she try to adorn herself with borrowed plumes when her mother's reputation is recognized even without this sofa. Of course, mistakes can happen when archiving, even the old catalogs of the furniture companies are sometimes incorrect, but if we question first-source information, then we have a problem.

Anyway, to clear up any last doubts, I sent an email with the request to confirm the attribution. Although it makes me feel a bit stupid and presumptuous if I question their competence. But who knows, maybe we get a surprise.

The family members behind Søborg certified in writing, wrongly, that the Kai Kristiansen nightstands that for a very long time had been falsely credited to Børge Mogensen were indeed Mogensen for Søborg.  More importantly, if you the context of what Mogensen designed for Søborg and when the case that those nightstands were an undocumented hit required absurd  logical contortions.

We can also point to the case if the Oda chair. The Nanna Ditzel website had it as a Nanna Ditzel design. And yet it was not.  And in that case Nanna Ditzel and Noritsugu Oda were friends so it is surprising that she never corrected him. I sent an email to Oda and asked about it and he confirmed that he got the Ditzel credit from a dealer in Copenhagen when he bought an Oda chair and he had just believed the dealer, and that was the origin for the false credit of the Oda chair to Nanna Ditzel. In reality it was designed by Arnold Madsen for Madsen & Schubell.  And all along there was food reason to doubt the idea that it was a Nanna Ditzel design.  This gets technical but factories tended to specialize by materials and the story always had been that Kolds Savværk was the maker. And Kolds was a woodworker’s shop producing little upholstery, yet we were to believe that the company produced an upholsterer’s chair, just one, once.  AP Stolen was an upholsterer, so that would have been a better hypothetical maker for an upholsterer’s chair, but on the documentation front worse, because AP was too high profile for it not to be documented anywhere.

So in short we have to always try to understand a historical context in order to properly value a family member’s statement or as you rightly point out, a piece of historical documentation. Not everything can be taken on face value. Not everything is true, but this does not mean that we can’t find the true story. 

Well, unfortunately it's not always possible to find the true story, with every new result the same question arises again: Is this finally the truth or not? Who can we believe and who cannot? Especially in regard to the historical context and the relationships between the designers, you can never be sure who is objectively truthful, personal relationships are always characterized by emotionality, one likes the other more and the other less, rivalry also played a role, and this sometimes leads to judgments and attributions, which you have to enjoy with caution. Even friendships are broken, the legal disputes between Mart Stam, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer are just one of many deterrent examples. Designers are only human too. 

@mvc Thanks anyway for writing the mail. You don’t have to feel stupid about it, it is pretty often the case that the family is not quite right about certain designs. A couple of days ago I had contact to a Dane who didn’t even know that his grandparents once owned a furniture company. Anyway: please let me know what Dennie told you. I‘m a bit surprised the sofa shows up there, to be honest.

@Herringbone

I just received the reply from Dennie Ditzel, she can't confirm the attribution to her mother/parents, and she wrote, that as fare as she knows her parents never worked together with Slagelse Møbelværk. She even checked the old drawing folders, but the model could not be found.

So the research continues.

@mvc Vielen Dank! 

I would put good money on it being Eva & Niels Koppel.  And I already contacted the family to ask but they don’t have any information.  They were not very successful with furniture and so that does not seem to have become important family lore.  

In terms of the larger historical context I am not talking about personal relationships or emotional situations. I am talking about how things were made, who was making them, how they were transported, how they were sold, who sold them, how they were advertised, how they were written about, where they were advertised, which things were successful, and the answers to these sorts of questions on a year by year basis. If we look at a catalog and think it has 30 designs and so 30 pieces of information, we are overlooking all the connections that can be made between that catalog and other catalogs and other historical facts we can find. Eventually you can start to understand what lies behind things.  And this way you can look at a given designer/maker attribution and know if it feels wrong and why.  

Of course if you are the layman and 6 dozen people claim to be experts and tell you, “believe me” certainly it may be hard to figure out what is the truth and who to believe, especially if you judge their expertise by the size of their house or the tone of their voice or anything else irrelevant to the truth you wish to find. That does not mean that there is no truth.  And the same is true even when dealing with absolute truths like mathematics.  Truth does not shine like gold; you have to study long and hard to find it. 

Keep cool, Zephyr, you sound like an esoteric on the hunt for truth. It's just furniture, it's just design.

To cut a long story short, I'm sure it's an in-house design, by the brothers Christensen. This seems to be the best option instead of all the wild speculations about Koppel or Ditzel or the Emperor of China.

@mvc is there some reason you object to the likelihood that the 185 sofa is a Koppel design?  (I don’t think it is an Alfred or Erik Christensen design; the documentation strongly suggests Koppel). 

Dear Zephyr, a couple of years ago you wrote on a certain subject: "That strongly suggests it was an in-house design". Subject was the 185 sofa.

And now that strongly suggests Koppel?

And what does it strongly suggest next year?

You see, it's all just wild speculation, nobody has the faintest idea.

@mvc Thanks for the message. You can also contact me directly via Instagram (@facesofdanishmodern) If you send me your email address there, I can respond.

@Herringbone

Hi O....r, I am neither an exhibitionist nor do I suffer from an excessive need for self-expression, which means that I am not interested in Instagram and Facebook.

Is there another solution?

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