Maggie Taft

This dissertation investigates the fabrication, distribution, and use of modern design in Denmark and abroad between 1945 and 1960. It focuses on the traffic in Danish furniture in order to trace and analyze the interrelationship between the politics of consumption and the discourses of modernism during the early years of the Cold War. Driven by close readings of furniture objects and a vast archive of pictorial and textual materials that have never before been studied, the project interrogates how the material and formal properties of Danish Modern both carried cultural meanings and intervened in national formations at a critical moment in the history of modernism.