Arne Jacobsen

The SAS Royal Hotel, Copenhagen, Denmark;

Private Collection, United States;

Christie's New York, December 17, 2015, lot 19;

Where acquired by the present collector.

Carsten Thau and Kjeld Vindum, Arne Jacobsen, Copenhagen, 1988, pp. 436, 439 and 441

Poul Erik Tøjner and Kjeld Vindum, Arne Jacobsen, Architekt & Designer, Copenhagen, 1995, p. 84

Michael A. Sheridan, Room 606: The SAS House and the Work of Arne Jacobsen, London, 2003, pp. 124, 202, 206 and 214

Arne Jacobsen was among the most prolific architects and designers of 20th-century Denmark, and a central figure in the development of Scandinavian modernism. He bridged architecture and design, working across public buildings, housing, commercial projects, and furniture to produce nearly 300 completed works over five decades, many distinguished by the close relationship between form and context. This emphasis reflected Jacobsen’s modernist influences and helped establish him as a leading figure of the functionalist movement globally, within architecture and design.

Jacobsen trained as an architect at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1924 to 1927, and while still a student exhibited chair designs at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, where he was awarded a silver medal. Throughout the following years, his work increasingly embraced the principles of simplicity and functionality that would come to define his practice and earn him international recognition. 

Although the Nazi occupation of Denmark forced him into exile in Sweden, Jacobsen returned to Copenhagen in 1945 and soon began work on one of his most significant achievements, the SAS Royal Hotel and airline terminal, completed in 1960. With total creative control, Jacobsen was able to integrate every aspect of the project, conceiving architecture, furniture, lighting, and even tableware as parts of a single design statement, a fully unified environment. For the hotel's interiors, he designed a new seating collection comprising six distinct models, approximately fifty of which were “Drop” chairs produced in leather.

Created for the hotel’s snack bar, the present “Drop” Chair was the most compact of these designs. Its brown leather-upholstered shell reduces the chair to a taut, abstract form that Jacobsen first sculpted in clay before translating it into molded foam. The shell is supported by a metal base with copper-plated steel legs, creating a visual contrast between the chair’s smooth organic form and its precise structural support. By reducing the chair to its essential elements without sacrificing comfort or elegance, Jacobsen created a design that embodies the core tenets of functionalism.