Certifying a Jens Risom arm chair--updated

Ain't she a beauty?

Back in 2005 or 2006, I was driving through my town in a cold rain and I went past a house where someone was moving out. There was a big heap of trash, but I saw this chair with some bright orange cushions. I pulled over, gave it a cursory inspection (Yes, it's a chair, not obviously falling apart) and put it in the back of the car.

The cushions were dirty, wet, and showing some wear. All in all, they grossed me out. I stood the chair in my garage, and in setting it down, it was clear to me that the sturdy frame was in very good condition.  I figured out how to remove the cushions, measured them, then hit eBay up for a funky fabric. I had a new project.

I found an upholsterer to fix the cushions up for a reasonable price, and I just beamed when it was ready. I really like this chair.

And oh! is it comfortable! It's a nice height. For a midcentury chair, it's very comfortable for anyone to sit in. Some MCM chairs are almost comically low. This was a chair designed to sit beside a desk or at a dining table. The broad, deep seat accommodates nearly every body's width and height. The arms are sturdy, and the feet stand very square on the floor, so even an elderly person who has some mobility issues can lean on this chair as she sits or rises.

The UNIVAC inventory sticker

The most curious thing I noticed about it right away, though, was the UNIVAC inventory sticker. That made me think for ten years that it was just some anonymous 1960s designer and manufacturer. Growing up in Aurora, IL, we had Lyon Metal and AllSteel Manufacturing, who made utilitarian items for workplaces. I've seen a lot of that sort of midcentury knockoff design. I noted this chair's untapered legs and spare ornamentation, and just figured it was something like an AllSteel chair, only made of wood.

Then last week, on a FaceBook Midcentury design group, someone posted an interior shot of a UNIVAC computer room (back when computers needed their own rooms), and I posted pictures of this chair. A comment suggested it "might be Risom" and I started a Google Image Search (GIS) for Risom armchairs and found an identical chair attributed to Jens Risom in the UK.  Well, that was good enough for me. 

Pay no attention to the mess in the background.

I noticed one of the times I had the chair upside-down that in the four corners of the underside, the braces have a maker's mark of a "B" inside a "G", inside a diamond. Huh. Who's that? I wondered. Back to Google. That led me to another conversation on designaddicts.com. While users there had posted some pictures of the mark, no one knew what it represented. We don't even know yet whether it says BG or GB.

Have I mentioned how much I love this chair?

However, user rtrindt had a chair just like mine (different fabric, of course). I said, "That's Risom" and provided the link to the UK site. User "leif erikson" said of my link, 'that's not definitive proof.' So we found some. User jkome found an old catalog of Risom's showroom with Knoll at Chicago's Merchandise Mart. In that picture, you can see a group of these chairs around a table. That's good, but it's not proof. 

Then another citation in jkome's next post shows several photos of a pair of these chairs. One of these photos is the paper tag on the underside, which state both "A Jens Risom Design" and "Risom Manufacturing Corp. North Grosvenordale, Conn." That proves it. This is a Jens Risom chair. Those two chairs in the 1stdibs posting are as described as teak, but I'm not so sure. Could be walnut, like mine.

Now to figure out who BG/GB is...

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2-14-16
I was watching Mad Men last night (the 2nd half of Season 7 was released recently on Netflix) when I saw two examples of this chair in a scene with Peggy. I was maybe a little too excited to have this validation about this chair, because, let's face it, Mad Men is largely a televised museum of MCM furnishings and textiles. Here's a screenshot. You can see the chairs with orange-red fabric behind Peggy as she walks off-camera.

A pair of Risom arm chairs (center) alongside the desks in Mad Men S7 E11.

Bowie Obituaries

It's taken me a long time to write my own ideas of David Bowie's death, and my obituary for him. I had come to a point in my music where Bowie's new music was largely peripheral in my attention after the rather ironically named Never Let Me Down. Heathen and a few other things I heard I liked, but I didn't rush out and buy them, either. 

At Christmastime, I had a weekday off of all responsibilities and wandered into a thrift shop, where I found the Sound And Vision CDs for $2. No book, no box, but the most important part for only $2! I loaded them into the CD player in my car and started a big Bowie kick. I pulled all my Bowie records down and put them on the shelf in the living room and immersed myself in Bowie for about two weeks before his birthday on January 8. And Blackstar got me excited again. Really excited. KEXP held "Intergalactic Bowie Day" on January 8, and I listened all day long. I kept swimming in an ocean of Bowie's music, and I've felt (about Bowie and many other records I've played in the last six months), that I'm hearing the music as though for the first time. The hair on my arms stand up when I hear music again. It's like a blockage in my brain has moved aside, and music is painting my neurons like they did when I was 15, 16 years old.

Then of course, January 10, I woke for work, grabbed my phone off the night stand, and saw the headline from the Chicago Tribune, that Bowie had died.

I was crushed. Gutted. KEXP responded as they could only be expected to: a shell-shocked second "Intergalactic Bowie Day," but this time the stories were memoirs, no longer quite the same ebullient admiration of an audience wondering of the next thing on the horizon. From now on, all we can do is line the records up on the shelf of time and point to the intersections of his life and the recordings. He was really gone. I wept as though I had lost a favorite uncle. I felt like a fool, to weep for a dead celebrity. But I then realized just how much Bowie had meant to me all these years.

I couldn't bring myself to listen to the album Blackstar for a couple of weeks. I had to just love his records like I did when he was alive. Just love those records. Not this one. I finally said, "Okay, David, what do you want to say to me?" and I listened (thanks to Amazon Prime Music streaming, I could hear it all). I heard in the first track his omniscient voice assuring me, while the music fluidly plucked the piano off Hunky Dory, the backup vocals from Ziggy and Aladdin Sane, the stomp and sway from Station To Station...it was as though he condensed one of his greatest hits records down into a song from beyond the grave. His lyrics assured me that there is only love and light after death, and that he had ceased fearing stepping over that threshold. And I finally accepted his death and wept harder than I had about his death. And finally, by the end of the record, I was reconciled with his death.

Since then, I've enjoyed three obituaries particularly well: Stewart Berman's and Tom Ewing's on Pitchfork, and Chris Jones' in the Chicago Tribune:

Profound was Bowie's sense of detachment from his own celebrity. Heck, maybe even unique. Thus he was able to create a separate character — David Bowie — allowing him to live as David Robert Jones in relative quiet. David Bowie was the performance-art project of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, whose name, of course, was David Robert Jones.

And

Bowie wrote, composed and filmed his own end, much as Shakespeare seemed to do in "The Tempest," actually. And in so doing he was able to offer his fans and lovers a sense of completion — and we all need a sense of completion — while buying his real self some honest-to-God privacy.

And yet I can say that Blackstar was given to us as a deeply personal and loving tribute to us, his fans.