Tag Archives: Verner Panton

Eye On Design: Verner Panton’s Heart Cone Chair

Heart Cone Chair
All Photos By Gail

In Verner Panton’s Notes on Color, the Danish designer stated:

“In Kindergarten, one learns to love and use colors. Later on, at school and in life, one learns something called taste. For most people, this means limiting their use of colors.”

Heart Cone Chair

The design career of Verner Panton (19261998) reached its first peak toward the end of the 1950s. With a furniture series based on simple geometric shapes, Panton anticipated elements of Pop Art, while also emulating the elegance of Scandinavian Modernism in the execution of the bases.

Heart Cone Chair

The most famous designs from this series are the Cone Chair and the Heart Cone Chair (1959). The Heart Cone Chair takes its name from its heart-shaped silhouette. The extended wings of the backrest are reminiscent of Mickey Mouse ears, but can also be interpreted as a contemporary development of the classic wingback chair.

Heart Cone Chair

Photographed at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in NYC.

Verner Panton Shell Hanging Lamps

Verner Panton Shell Lamps
Photo By Gail

These gorgeous lamps can be found in one of my favorite NYC restaurants, Elmo on Seventh Avenue between 19th and 20th Streets.

Verner Panton Red Chandelier with Reflection

Red Chandelier with Reflection

Photographed by Gail at The Park Restaurant on 10th Avenue and 17th Street, NYC.

Psychedelic Art Exhibit at NYC’s Whitney Museum Gives Gail Flashbacks!

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LOVE by Robert Indiana

Geoffrey and I spent a few hours this afternoon uptown at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art blowing our minds at their current exhibit, Summer of Love, which is so amazing it will make your head explode. We were able to get in free with my ID card from work, but it’s totally worth the $15 admission. One of my favorite parts of the exhibit was the “Roomful of Mirrors,” while Geoffrey couldn’t stop talking about this one installation “Phantasy Landscape Visiona II,” by Verner Panton, which he repeatedly referred to as “The Vagina Room.”

If you can get to NYC you should visit this exhibit as many times as humanly possibly before it ends.

Here’s a descriptive blurb on the exhibit from the Whitney Website.

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On view May 24-September 16, 2007

Summer of Love revisits the unprecedented explosion of contemporary art and popular culture brought about by the civil unrest and pervasive social change of the 1960s and early ’70s, when a new psychedelic aesthetic emerged in art, music, film, architecture, graphic design, and fashion. The exhibition includes paintings, photographs and sculptures by Richard Avedon, Jimi Hendrix, and Andy Warhol, among others. As well as a rich selection of important posters, album covers and underground magazines. A special emphasis is placed on environments as well as on film, video and multimedia installations. The art in the exhibition is conceptualized through a wealth of documentary material highlighting events, people and places; from the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival to Timothy Leary to the UFO nightclub in London.