Alessandro Mendini - Design Masters New York Tuesday, December 17, 2013 | Phillips

Design Masters

New York 17 December 2013 6pm

  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from Dilmos SRL, Milan, 1980

  • Literature

    Barbara Radice, Elogio del banale, Milan, 1980, front cover
    Andrea Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design, Cambridge, 1984, p. 123, fig. 321
    Albrecht Bangert, Italian Furniture Design: Ideas Styles Movements, Munich, 1988, pp. 63, 65, 116
    Giampiero Bosoni, il Modo Italiano: Italian Design and Avant-garde in the 20th Century, exh. cat., The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec, 2007, p. 345
    Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt eds., Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–1990, exh. cat., The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2011, p. 41

  • Catalogue Essay

    Alessandro Mendini designed his "Poltrona di Proust" for the 1978 "Room of the Century" exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy. Mendini based his design on an 18th-century Rococo-style armchair which he purchased in the Veneto and which was subsequently hand-painted by Prospero Rasulo and Pier Antonio Volpini. Together the two artists executed the first four or five examples of "Proust" by projecting a Paul Signac painting onto each chair and hand-painting over the patterns. The wood and upholstery of the chair functioned as both canvas and frame for the pointillist painting. As such, these early examples of "Proust" are unique and reflect the attitudes of each painter. Only very early chairs adhere to the pattern and pallete determined by the original Signac painting. Over time five different painters produced chairs and their decorations deviated significantly from that original template, with the appearance of the chairs increasingly determined by the painters themselves.

    The present lot is among the earliest examples of "Poltrona di Proust" painted in 1980 by Francesco Migliaccio, who succeeded Prospero Rasulo and Pier Antonio Volpini. The present chair is therefore one the very first of these "aesthetic bombs" to explode the modernist orthodoxy of functionalism.

439

Alessandro Mendini

Early "Poltrona di Proust"

1980
Painted fabric, painted wood.
42 7/8 x 40 1/2 x 35 1/2 in. (108.9 x 102.9 x 90.2 cm)
Hand-painted by Francesco Migliaccio. Together with a certificate of authenticity from Alessandro Mendini.

Estimate
$50,000 - 70,000 

Sold for $62,500

Contact Specialist
Meaghan Roddy
Head of Sale, New York
mroddy@phillips.com
+ 1 212 940 1266

Design Masters

New York 17 December 2013 6pm