Mid2Mod: Walter and Greta von Nessen

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Walter and Greta von Nessen

Walter von Nessen (1889-1943) was a German-born industrial designer. Prior to World War I, he was a student of Bruno Paul at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin and a teacher at the Charlottenburg Art School. After the war, he was employed by architect Peter Behrens. From 1919 to 1923, he designed furniture in Stockholm.

Greta von Nessen (1900-1975) was the daughter of an architect. Born in Sweden in 1900, she graduated from the School for Industrial Arts in Stockholm and married Walter von Nessen.

In 1923 the couple immigrated to the United States and in 1926 founded Nessen Studios in New York, where they almost exclusively designed and fabricated architectural lighting.

The couple attracted the attention of top architects with their sleek lamp designs and soon rose to prominence in the New York design world, becoming part of the vanguard of modern industrial designers, along with such notables as Raymond Loewy, Donald Deskey, Eliot Noyes, Russel Wright and Gilbert Rohde.

Walter von Nessen's career culminated with the introduction of a series of swing arm lamps, while Greta von Nessen's most famous design is the Anywhere Lamp, which was introduced in 1951. It has been featured on a U.S. postage stamp and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

After her husband's death in 1943, Greta von Nessen continued to design lamps out of their studio, now known as Nessen Lighting.

From cooperhewitt.org and nessenlighting.com