The present coffee table and wall-mounted console (lot 14), produced circa 1950, can be counted amongst the rare and remarkable products of the post-war collaboration between two pillars of Italian twentieth-century art and design, architect Osvaldo Borsani and artist Lucio Fontana. Originating in Casa Kramer in Milan, home of musician Gorni Kramer, the two lots form part of a series of Borsani furniture designs elaborated with the idiosyncratic, Baroque-inspired mark of Fontana and produced, on a bespoke basis, for Borsani's Milanese bourgeois clientele of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Borsani engaged in a number of collaborations with avant-garde artists in the post-war period, the unity of the arts becoming something of a trademark of Arredamenti Borsani Varedo (ABV), his father's firm for which he worked. Sharing with Borsani the desire to explore not only this interdisciplinary approach, but also the dialogue between modernism and tradition and the boundaries between matter and surrounding space, Fontana was the most meaningful of these collaborators.
A historical image of the present coffee table inside Casa Kramer, Milan.
Image: © Archivio Osvaldo BorsaniAfter the war, the success of ABV, popular amongst Milan's upper classes of the 1930s for its Italian Deco style furniture, was largely due to Borsani's ability to accommodate the tastes and aspirations of this wealthy client base in his design output. These values were informed partly by the film industry: by a longing for the dreamy, fantastic world of Hollywood, and by a nostalgic craze for the 'Telefoni bianchi' films of the 1930s, with their lavish Art Deco sets and socially conservative messages. At the same time, the economic boom of the 1950s brought about a certain openness to new ideas that allowed Borsani's avant-garde partnerships to thrive. Borsani's collaboration with Fontana epitomised the flight-of-fancy attitude and spirit of transition characterising this early 1950s moment. At Casa Kramer, the architect's striking modernist designs, from furnishings like the present coffee table and console to the interior architecture itself, were draped in Fontana's theatrical, Baroque forms, a historic movement admired by the artist for its synthesis of painting, sculpture, and architecture. This dialogue between tradition and modernism was also reflected in Borsani's individual oeuvre, Casa Kramer being one of his final domestic projects integrating traditional craft techniques before he founded his industrial furniture production firm, Tecno, in 1953.
At the time of the Casa Kramer commission, both Borsani and Fontana were intensely concerned with the relationship between individual objects and the surrounding space. Fontana’s own fixation on the Baroque derived, in part, from its emphasis on ''the [a]esthetic of organic movement'' over the ''empty [a]esthetic of fixed forms'', as he explained in the first manifesto of his own movement, Spatialism, in 1947. As reflected in the expressive, continuous ribbon base of the present console, Fontana's Spatialism was an art that emphasised the dynamic element of the plastic form. At the same time, Borsani's own interior projects were dominated by the desire to create a sense of continuity between the furnishings and broader space, achieved, as in Fontana, by a blurring of the distinctions between art forms and dimensions.
A recent image of the interior of Casa Kramer, Milan.
Image: Private family archiveThe result of the convergence of Borsani and Fontana's ideas was the total integration of the interior, expressed in its full form at Casa Kramer. This was especially true of the lounge, where the pair's experiments in the union of the arts, the assimilation of the object into its surroundings and the dissolving of the boundaries between dimensions all played out simultaneously in the space. As testified by a historical photograph of the lounge, the present coffee table, encircled by a huddle of crimson soft furnishings, entered into visual dialogue with Fontana's Matisse-like arabesque paintings behind it, its swirling ceramic feature corresponding formally to the high-relief elements surging from the wall. This tying together of different parts of the interior, furthered by the consonance between the fringed furniture and the floor-length drapes enveloping the outer wall, offered the lounge a unique sense of vitality, calling to mind art critic Duilio Morosini's description of Fontana's work with its ''flow of rhythmic lines […] musically vibrating in space''. Taken together, and disclosing a snippet of this Casa Kramer conversation in their own interaction, the present coffee table and console bear witness to the energetic post-war period of creative exchange between Borsani and Fontana.
Provenance
Private collection, Milan, commissioned directly from the designer
Thence by descentLiterature
Enrico Crispolti, Fontana: Catalogo Generale, Volume ll, Milan, 1986, illustrated p. 733
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Milan, 2006, illustrated p. 961
Giampiero Bosoni, Osvaldo Borsani: Architect, Designer, Entrepreneur, Milan, 2018, illustrated pp. 322-23, 362
Norman Foster, Tommaso Fantoni and Giampiero Bosoni, Osvaldo Borsani, exh. cat., Triennale di Milano, Milan, 2018, illustrated p. 121
13
Rare coffee table, from Casa Kramer, Milan
circa 1950
Sapele mahogany, reverse painted glass, brass, gilded and painted wood.
61 x 75 x 75 cm (24 x 29 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.)
Produced by Arredamenti Borsani, Varedo, Italy. Underside with manufacturer's metal label printed ABV/ARREDAMENTI/BORSANI/Varedo (Milano). Together with a certificate of expertise from the Osvaldo Borsani Archive.
Estimate
£30,000 - 50,000 ‡♠
Sold for £95,250
Antonia King
Head of Sale, Design
+44 20 7901 7944
Antonia.King@phillips.com
Design
London Auction 13 November 2024
