Swedish retailer Ikea's approach to design not only revolutionized the way many Canadians live, it earned its own exhibition at Die Neue Sammlung - The International Design Museum in Munich.
With around 70.000 objects in its collections of industrial design, graphic design and the arts and crafts the Neue Sammlung is today one of the world's leading museums of 20th century applied art, and indeed the largest of industrial design. It is now the first museum to devote a major exhibition of Ikea objects.
Walking through the display is a bit like browsing through the Ikea Toronto store. But at the museum, the focus is not on kitchens, beds or children's furniture, but on design classics: chairs by Gerrit Rietveld and Michael Thonet, the famous String shelves and Bauhaus pieces by Marcel Breuer.
While other design exhibitions tout big names, this one - under the title "Democratic Design" - has a different claim to fame, summed up in a quote from a 1979 Ikea catalogue: "The aesthetic form is here for all. And not just for the museum!"
Corinna Roesner, one of the curators of the exhibition, has been quoted as saying that the combination of the museum's permanent design exhibition and Ikea pieces was particularly interesting, because visitors could recognize where many of the ideas came from for furniture pieces they are familiar with.
Since the end of the 1980s, the museum collected pieces from Ikea. The International Design Museum Munich, which presented the show in collaboration with Ikea. Half of the items in the exhibition come from the Neue Sammlung collection and the other half from the Ikea museum or private lenders."
It is one of the few design shows where a large number of visitors can say that they, too, own a design original. For most, it's the "Billy" shelves in white. They have been sold 28 million times since Ikea opened in 1948.
What came across to me, who has never owned a piece of Ikea, was that for many it was the realization of the age-old dream that beautiful things should be for everyone. This was goal of the German Bauhaus and the British Arts and Crafts designers. But it remained elusive; ‘design’ was always expensive.
But also, when the original design and the Ikea version stand side by side, it is obvious how boldly the blue-yellow furniture makers stole, cloned, and developed further the most beautiful concepts in the history of design. “Billy”, the shelf, is almost an exact copy of a prototype by Bruno Paul from 1908.
At any rate there could be no better advertising for Ikea and for the power of early 20th century European design carried around the world in this age of globalization.
For more information, click on http://www.die-neue-sammlung.de.
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