The Platinum Egg 1986: Torbjörn Lenskog.
He put a great deal of energy into convincing the world’s leading creatives to guest lecture at Beckmans School of Design, sharing their expertise with younger generations. It is thus only fitting that he was awarded the Platinum Egg the same year as Anders Beckman, who received it posthumously two decades after his death. Carl Fredrik Hultenheim emphasized art director Lenskog’s origins in his article in the Golden Egg Book, writing about his Platinum Egg...: “Gravitas, authority and humour are what reveal the true great men of Dalarna [Lenskog was born in that heartland region in 1936, in Idkerberget, near Ludvika]. Along with the disciplined expert in the field is mixed the natural historian, the street urchin, even the somewhat irrational Lenskog. The constrained imagination is nourished by the latter, which is where the high hat, tails and tufts of the traditional Dalarna formal outfit give way, drawing back in the local flora, the twinflower and the honeysuckle. Torbjörn goes his own way, apparently unaffected by the temporary whims of fashion. He, more than anybody, works with a concentration that shuts out and excludes all irrelevancies.” Speaking of irrelevancies, Lenskog may have been the Swedish art director who most often skipped headlines in advertisements. In the art of graphic streamlining, Torbjörn had few — if any — competitors in this country, according to Hultenheim. Personally, Lenskog liked to give the impression that he simply preferred taking the easy way out. In any case, he also avoided the big agencies through the years. This may reveal an instinct for survival. On the streets of Stockholm, just past lunchtime, you would see him coming, gaze fixed on the horizon, toes pointing in slightly, like a restless polar bear intent on a goal, scanning the polar expanse, waiting to dig his claws into something that unsuspectingly happened to stick its head up out of a hole in the ice: a unique idea, a unique collector’s item…
After the Platinum Egg: Collecting took over. First modernist, then older and rare books, preferably by and about Linnaeus. The latter collection ended up in Japan. And then there were the industrial design objects – which became a big exhibition at the Nationalmuseum and later served as the foundation of an ambitious (but unfortunately later capsized) regional initiative, the House of Design in Bergslagen. He who dies with the most stuff, wins. Lenskog passed away in 2020.