Diego Giacometti Pair of 'Têtes de Lionnes' armchairs, second version. Conceived 1979, executed 1979-1981. Patinated bronze, wrought iron, leather.

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Composed of patinated bronze and wrought iron, the pair of 'Têtes de Lionnes' armchairs from April's Important Design simultaneously features a soft unevenness, revealing the artist's hand, and a structural strength, as historically symbolized by the lion. The highlights of green and gold revealed in the armchairs' patination give the objects a subtle richness while enhancing their sculptural quality.

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Evoking forms from ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian excavations, the present lot reflects Diego Giacometti 's admiration for these civilizations—a lifelong inspiration following a trip to Egypt in his youth.

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\nOne of Diego's most iconic designs, these armchairs, which each feature two lion busts, pay homage to the client for whom the first version of the armchair was designed. In 1970, four years after the death of his brother, Diego conceived the armchairs for Henrietta Vronsky-Asch, a friend of Alberto's, whose astrological sign was Leo. Following the first version of the armchair, which presented four evenly molded feet, the second version was refined with front feet shaped as lion's paws, as illustrated in the present lot.
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\nThe original owner of this pair of 'Têtes de Lionnes' armchairs was part of a noble family, much celebrated in Paris, and notorious for their parties during the 1930s-1940s. Through an introduction by Henri Samuel, one of the most celebrated French interior designers of the twentieth century, the princess met Diego, subsequently giving her the opportunity to acquire these iconic pieces of design.

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\n","2018-04-18T17:46:46.000000Z",[],"https://www.phillips.com/article/31032929/lion-headed-diego-giacometti-armchairs",288,317,31032929,{"_3762":3789,"_3763":233,"_3764":3790,"_131":3791,"_3765":3792,"_3766":3793,"_3767":103,"_464":3794,"_3768":1534,"_3769":453,"_3770":3795,"_443":493,"_3771":3796,"_3773":3797,"_3775":3798},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/courtesy-of-wendell-castle-studio_s600x0.jpeg","Our Design specialists provide an in-depth look at important pieces by Wendell Castle and Judy Kensley McKie, two pioneers who represent the cross-section of the emergence and continued inventiveness of American studio furniture.","Wendell Castle and Judy Kensley McKie: Woodworking of the American East Coast","

Wendell Castle in his studio, 1970s. Courtesy of Wendell Castle Studio.

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The 1960s, a decade long associated with radical change, saw its effects ripple through most cultural spheres; bucking aesthetic and technical tradition, artists and designers forged new paths across multiple media and forms of expression. Among the most traditional of media, woodworking experienced a fascinating shift in the 1960s, from which the cultural and aesthetic implications still echo over 50 years later. Among the groundbreaking designers who emerged from this pivotal moment were Wendell Castle and Judy Kensley McKie, two American woodworkers whose divergent interpretation of the craft provided the groundwork for wood's continued exploration.

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Following World War II, American furniture design was largely influenced by industry and focused on mass-production. However, the time-honored tradition of hand-making wood furniture had also continued steadily, exemplified by established figures such as Wharton Esherick and George Nakashima on the East Coast and Sam Maloof on the West Coast. While West Coast woodworking curricula favored a self-expressive and sculptural approach, instructors on the East Coast favored traditional cabinetmaking techniques focusing on the virtuosity of skill in creating functional furniture. Highly skilled and virtuosic in their medium, these woodworkers showcased wood's natural attributes of color and grain and created pieces built to endure time. These 'designer-craftsmen' honed their craft to reproduce their own designs as a small-scale industry, sometimes even working in collaboration with industry and larger design manufacturers.

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However, by the beginning of the 1960s, this model of craftsperson had fallen out of favor, giving rise to woodworkers who treated furniture as art to create expressive sculptural works by hand. This new woodworker slipped seamlessly between genres, producing works that could be categorized as either furniture or sculpture.

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Setting up his studio in Rochester, New York, Wendell Castle, who had studied industrial design and sculpture, began his career just as the decade was starting. The rise of furniture-as-sculpture demanded experimentation with new techniques to allow these more expressive forms to be seen to fruition. In order to realize new shapes and greater scale in his work, Castle turned to stack lamination — the literal stacking and gluing of wood boards — as his medium of choice. Working with a firm block-like stack, Castle carved large forms into the wood, which he then sanded into smooth organic shapes. Departing from traditional furniture forms, Castle bridged the gap between furniture and sculpture in a groundbreaking way, becoming the most influential woodworker of the 1960s and 1970s. In Lee Nordness' seminal traveling exhibition from 1969, Objects: USA, Castle was declared "largely responsible for the recent renaissance of wood as a creative medium."

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I believe that furniture should not be derived from furniture…New concepts will arise only when we clear our minds of preconceived notions about the way furniture should look.
\n— Wendell Castle
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Wendell Castle Unique three-seater sofa, 1974. Featured in our upcoming Important Design auction in London on 26 April 2018.

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Executed in 1974, Castle's three-seater sofa exemplifies this peak moment of his early career. The sculptural frame seemingly contradicts the form of a traditional sofa: the fluidity of the frame and its gradual changes in thickness from the large plank-like legs to the impossibly thin seat lend a nearly anthropomorphic presence to a functional design.

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Having become a central focus of the studio craft movement, woodworking had gained academic recognition by the 1970s. The practice expanded rapidly at the collegiate level with 150 undergraduate woodworking programs and ten master's degree programs offered within the United States. In 1975, the first issue of Fine Woodworking magazine, one of the most successful craft-focused periodicals of the twentieth century, was published. Major museums across the nation exhibited and acquired wood furniture, and in some cases even commissioned works for their collections. Importantly, wood was evolving.

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Judy Kensley McKie in her studio, 1980s. Courtesy of Judy Kensley McKie Studio.

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Among the woodworkers to emerge during this period was Judy Kensley McKie, working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, McKie turned to furniture-making when she began building simple, functional pieces to use in her own house, turning her basement into a makeshift studio. She joined the New Hamburger Cabinetworks, a furniture-making collective outside Boston, to further hone her skills, and her furniture designs shifted from boxy forms to more curvilinear, sculptural forms. In 1975, McKie began incorporating highly stylized animal imagery into her designs, inspired by ancient Greek and Egyptian art, as well as imagery of folk and primitive cultures. Instead of stack-laminated wood, she favored woods with simple, unified grains. Such wood types were suitable for carving animal forms in low relief and allowed McKie to add stain or color to complete her imaginative designs.

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McKie's work garnered international attention following the 1979 exhibition New Handmade Furniture, which also included works by Castle. The convergence of art with furniture design had thrived, and by the early 1980s, McKie was poised to occupy this critical juncture of its evolution. McKie's style developed to incorporate imagery beyond the surface and into the furniture's structural elements, often integrating the body of the animal into the overall, structural shape of her design.

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The most exciting part of working is finding out whether an idea is going to work in three dimensions. You do a drawing, work everything out, cut all the parts and put them together, and then you start carving. As I see the shapes emerge from the pieces of wood, that's the pinnacle of the creative process.
\n— Judy Kensley McKie
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Judy Kensley McKie 'Leopard Couch', 1983. Featured in our upcoming Important Design auction in London on 26 April 2018.

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In Leopard Couch of 1983, two leopards join to form the entire backrest structure of the couch—their legs becoming the spindles, faces the center crest and their tails curving around to form armrests. In what would be described as 'faux-naïveté,' McKie's new style fit instantly with the rising aesthetic of the decade's overturn of modernism.

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The two very diverse bodies of work of Wendell Castle and Judy Kensley McKie represent a cross-section of the emergence, development and continued inventiveness of the studio furniture movement. Both self-taught woodworkers, their artistic backgrounds would prove monumentally important to the field’s growth and exploration, and their contributions to the craft of woodworking immeasurable.

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View these works in London from 19-26 April prior to our auction of Important Design at 2pm BST on 26 April 2018.

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\n","2018-03-06T21:29:46.000000Z",[],"https://www.phillips.com/article/29931234/wendell-castle-and-judy-kensley-mckie-woodworking-of-the-american-east-coast",289,290,29931234,{"_3762":3800,"_3763":233,"_3764":3801,"_131":3802,"_3765":3803,"_3766":3804,"_3767":103,"_464":3805,"_3768":1534,"_3769":453,"_3770":3806,"_443":238,"_3771":3807,"_3773":3808,"_3775":3809},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/p153_001-e06540c6-b9d0-4106-afcd-1160a40c2cc1_s600x0.jpg","Hear from Fulvio Ferrari and other scholars on a selection of rare, museum-worthy Sottsass furniture and ceramics in our April sale of Important Design.","Important Works by Ettore Sottsass","

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Bruno Gecchelin Ettore Sottsass. Negative date 1974, printed 2017. Chromogenic print. Estimate £1,500 - 2,500.

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The 'Nefertiti' writing desk is among the first furniture pieces to be executed with decorative plastic laminate in the history of design. It is the result of the collaboration between Ettore Sottsass and the Italian manufacturer Abet Laminati, the first to introduce new techniques for screen-printing of plastic laminates following Sottsass' vision.
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\nDesigned in 1967, stylistically, the design follows from the series of 'Superbox' wardrobes, which Sottsass also conceived for Poltronova. Importantly, with these designs, Sottsass sought to demonstrate to Abet Laminati the economic potential of this innovative process. The large series of enigmatic column-shaped units, which, freed from clear function and endowed with a strong figurative value, impose a new way of domestic living and interacting. Largely remaining a conceptual project for Sottsass, and with only a few prototypes ever produced, the project initiated a laminate screen-printing workshop at Abet Laminati.

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...among the first furniture pieces to be executed with decorative plastic laminate in the history of design.
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Ettore Sottsass 'Nefertiti' writing desk, 1968-1969

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Equally colorful and enigmatic, the 'Nefertiti' writing desk was introduced to the Poltronova catalogue shortly thereafter, where it was offered until the mid-1970s. Exclusively by order, only a few examples of the desk were ever executed. The original design was conceived by Sottsass in white and green vertical laminate stripes on the exterior, with a white interior, such as the present lot from our April London sale of Important Design. Color variations included pink and white stripes, with white interior; green and white stripes applied only on the front and back elevation, with all other sides in white; or entirely white monochrome. It is probable that other variations also exist.
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\nThe green and white striped writing desk was included in the principal exhibitions on Ettore Sottsass' work of this period, notably the 'Miljo for en ny Planet' exhibition at the National Museum of Stockholm in 1969, and 'Italy: The New Domestic Landscape' at MoMA, New York in 1972, the latter acquiring the writing desk for their permanent collection in the same year. —Architetto Milco Carboni

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Ettore Sottsass Totem, no. 18, 1966

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The 'Torri', designed by Sottsass between 1964-1965, constituted an anomaly within the history of the architect's ceramic oeuvre: their large scale, their polychrome appearance and their placement on a white plinth were each unprecedented elements within his work.
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\nSottsass explained that he designed the totems to be a monumental translation of the series of pills he was administered daily during his stay at an American hospital, where he was admitted in 1962 with a near-fatal Nephritis. The devastating illness, however, brought forth some wonderful atonement. From his hospital bed, Sottsass dreamt up some of the most important projects of his career: the 'Ceramiche delle Tenebre', the 'Ceramiche di Shiva' and the exhibition 'Menhir, Ziggurat, Stupas, Hydrants & Gas Pumps', as well as the creation of the magazine 'Room East 128. Chronicle', introduced the same year.
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\nIn the first issue of 'Room East 128', Sottsass referred to himself as 'King of a Cortisone', publishing sketches in which he vertically stacked the brightly colored pills that he had to swallow each day—Cortisone, Phenobarbital, Librium, Potassium Chloride, etc.—suspending them over a glass and titling the drawing 'TOTEM, detto PALO ALTO'. Upon his return to Milan, healed and grateful, he translated the drawing of those pills to large stackable cylinders, turned on the wheel, white or hand-painted with bright colors reminiscent of road signs.
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\nLater on, he would write: 'I have made mountains of clay, impossible to realize, impossible to move, to assemble, to use and pay for'. Is this not a wonderful definition of the artist's work? —Fulvio Ferrari

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...his friends enjoyed spending time in a room full of ceramics, which resembled an odd garden full of giant flowers.
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The present totem features a painted wooden base with seven cylinders and two discs in earthenware, thrown and turned with colored glazes against a white background. The work consists of four stackable parts, as some of the elements have been fused together during the manufacturing process: a mechanism known as 'incastro a battente' united the juxtaposed cylinders following their glazing and second firing. The structure was subsequently further strengthened by an internal metal pole.
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\nThis totem belongs to the series of 'big colored columns, more than two meters tall', which Sottsass conceived between 1964 and 1966. The work was manufactured by Bitossi & Sons under the expert supervision of the company's artistic director Aldo Londi. Sottass' designs were delivered to Londi by his young apprentice Clinio Trini Castelli, who, after the process of throwing, turning and biscuit firing, personally took part in the glazing and definition of its graphic patterns.

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The study of the ever-changing meaning and the dimensions of an object was a focal point for Sottsass; a few examples that come to mind are 'things in the gardens and totem' designed in 1965 and the stratified ceramics produced from 1961-1962. Sottsass' large ceramics works, which he considered to be 'deliberately and irremediably wrong' and not meant to be sold and used, were displayed in the exhibition 'Menhir, Ziggurat, Stupas, Hydrants & Gas Pumps' at Galleria Sperone, Milan in April 1967. The works were exhibited later that year in June at La Bertesca Gallery, Genoa, and then in September at Poltronova's showroom in Adigliana with the title 'Wrong Ceramics'. The columns were displayed in groups of two to four in the room, 'creating strange architeture', said Sottsass, and proving that the ceramics could occupy the surrounding space and determine its meaning. The objects therefore became the link between the spatial and sensorial experience of the viewer with their primary function acting as an energy catalyst.
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\nThese sculptures gained particular success among his friends who 'enjoyed spending time in a room full of ceramics, which resembled an odd garden full of giant flowers' (from a letter written by Sottsass to Aldo Londi, 31 May 1967). —Marina Vignozzi Paszkowski

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Ettore Sottsass Composizione di elementi di legno colorato e specchio, il tutto unito da funi di canapa, designed for Galleria Arform, Milan, 1959

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Between 1958 and 1968, Ettore Sottsass was actively involved in projects at the Milanese gallery Il Sestante. Not only did he invite artists and designers to create pieces for the gallery, but during this period he also designed some of the finest and most interesting works of his career: ceramics, enamels and some lesser known wooden objects. Among his technical drawings dating to 1960 are projects for large mirrors, as illustrated, which apparently were never realized for the Sestante gallery. It is now understood that these drawings were informed by the design for the present lot, considered to be unique, which Sottsass presented the prior year, in 1959, at the Arforn gallery in Milan.
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\nThe work is described as a 'Composition of colored wooden elements and mirror; all joined by hemp ropes'. By virtue of Sottsass' close relationship with the founder of Sestante gallery, the present mirror later became part of the collection of the gallerist Lina Matteucci. This work is of particular importance as it shares similarities with the abstract language of the architect's metal sculpture of the 1950s, while also informing the compositional works Sottsass executed nearly 50 years later, including the illustrated drawing for a vase, dated 2004. This unique piece also illustrates the architect's interest in oriental culture, which he would continue to explore in later works such as 'Ceramiche Tantriche' and 'Homage to Shiva'.
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\nThe wooden elements are stained in different colors, their spatial relationship to each other and to the mirror creating a calligraphic composition that defines this extraordinary and important work within Sottsass' oeuvre. Furthermore, the architecture of this work, featuring abstract geometric shapes delineated by ropes, recalls ethnic jewelry, which was a great passion for both Sottsass and his then-wife Fernanda Pivano. —Fulvio Ferrari

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Browse more designs by Ettore Sottsass, ranging from furniture and lighting to ceramics and totems, coming to auction on 26 April at Phillips Berkeley Square, London.

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Overview

Auction Info