Alice Rawsthorn: Farewell to Sottsass and his 2 golden ages of Italian design
E-Mail Article
Printer-Friendly
3-Column Format
Translate
Share Article
Text Size
LONDON: Back in the mid-1990s, a friend and I went to the opening of an Ettore Sottsass retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris. Among the exhibits were dozens of Polaroid photographs of hotel beds with rumpled sheets. The labels explained that Sottsass routinely photographed all of the beds in which he'd had sex.
"Ugh! It's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen," squealed my friend, who is beautiful as well as blunt. We heard a chuckle, and turned around to see the great designer standing beside the photographer, Helmut Newton. "I am sorry you think that, my dear, but I enjoyed it," said Sottsass.
That was Sottsass: charismatic, confident, and sometimes shameless. He dominated postwar Italian design until his death in Milan last week at 90, and enjoyed not one but two golden ages as a designer. The first was his work with the Italian electronics company, Olivetti, in the 1960s and 1970s, when he imbued its products with the brio of pop culture. The second was as the leader of the Memphis group of (mostly much younger) designers in the early 1980s, when they repackaged the postmodernist philosophy, then fashionable in literature and architecture, in the form of trashily surreal furniture.
No survey of late 20th-century design was complete without him. Nor was the annual Milan Furniture Fair, where Sottsass held court at his exhibition openings (note the plural; there were several each year) looking like a raffish wizard, extravagantly mustachioed with white hair wisping into a ponytail. He also found time for painting, writing, architecture, photography and fun.
There were other powerful, charismatic 20th-century designers. Take the color-obsessed Dane, Verner Panton, holed up in all-white rooms. Or the master of Finnish modernism, Alvar Aalto, whose chauffeur would circle Helsinki Airport until it was time for Aalto's grand entrance as the last passenger to board his flight. Or the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, telling a client who complained of a leaky roof: "You need a plumber, not an architect."
Multimedia
Related Articles
Today in Style & Design
Yet Sottsass's death seems particularly poignant, because he was among the last of the 20th-century design greats. Will a new generation of design titans be as important to design this century? The answer lies in why Sottsass and his peers became so powerful.
The first - and non-negotiable - factor is talent. Design history is littered with the corpses of showmen whose work didn't live up to the hype. Sottsass wasn't as original as his contemporaries, Achille Castiglioni and Joe Colombo, but he was blessed with a great eye - even his kitschest later work was formally refined - and the gift of translating ideas into objects that embodied the spirit of their time.
The bright red Valentine portable typewriter he designed for Olivetti in 1969 resonates with pop art's optimism, and is so beautifully composed that it still looks seductive today.
He was also media-savvy. Sottsass played the maestro to perfection, and was eminently quotable. The Valentine was the "anti-machine machine," and later "too obvious . . . like a girl wearing a very short skirt and too much make-up." His greatest publicity coup was Memphis, which translated the ideas he'd developed with Alessandro Mendini's Studio Alchymia design group in late 1970s into digestible "soundbite design." Memphis's mythology was embellished by packed opening parties and photographs of Sottsass cavorting with his young collaborators in a "conversation pit," designed by Masanori Umeda to look like a boxing ring. One of his less appealing legacies was the design media boom triggered by Memphis.
Talent, charm and spin are equally useful to designers today, but Sottsass also benefited from unusually favorable economic and political conditions. Throughout design history, designers have been most creative - or have been given the opportunity to be - during periods of strong economic growth and technological progress. They have also been helped by imaginative local manufacturers, typically entrepreneurs running family firms.
That's what happened in postwar America when furniture companies like Herman Miller and Knoll championed such designers as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and Eero Saarinen. The same scenario played out in 1960s Italy when Olivetti, Flos, Kartell and Zanotta harnessed the talent of Sottsass, Castiglioni and Colombo.
It's less likely to happen today. One reason is globalization. The most successful design company of our time, Apple, is based in the United States with a mostly British design team and contract production plants in China. Manufacturers now trawl the world for designers and communicate with them digitally, rather than across factory floors. Sottsass's successors - Jasper Morrison in Britain, Konstantin Grcic in Germany, Naoto Fukasawa in Japan and the Bouroullecs in France - work for clients in many different countries, rather than shaping a national design identity.
Latest News
