Ettore Sottsass at the Met: Inside A World of Quirks
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Master of ‘Bastard Design.’ “Godfather of Italian Cool.” “Anti Design Hero.” Ettore Sottsass, who died on New Year’s Eve in 2007 and would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year, collected many illustrious titles over the decades of his ri
Ettore Sottsass at the Met: Inside A World of Quirks
Master of ‘Bastard Design.’ “Godfather of Italian Cool.” “Anti Design Hero.” Ettore Sottsass, who died on New Year’s Eve in 2007 and would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year, collected many illustrious titles over the decades of his rich and productive career. Known to many chiefly as the founder of the Milan-based Memphis Group, which was active in the 1980s, Sot sass lived up to hiscre do that “there is no border between architecture, sculpture, design, and painting,” creating some of design history’s most idiosyncratic works that continue to fascinate and irritate.Sottsass was born on October 14, 1917 in the Austrian town of Innsbruck and grew up in Torino, Italy, as the son of the architect Ettore Sottsass senior, who was firmly rooted in Italian Modernism. After his graduation from the Politecnico di Torino in Architecture in 1939, the younger Sottsass was conscripted as a soldier in World War II, most of which he spent as a prisoner of war in a Yugoslavian concentration camp. Following his release, Sottsass worked with his father for a short period, before moving to Milan in 1945, where his infamous emancipation from Modernism took its course. In the next years he would move to New York to briefly work for the industrial designer George Nelson, and he returned to Italy to create furniture for Poltronova. It was his engagement with the Italian firm Olivetti, however, that resulted in his first widely noted commercial designs and a reputation for being rebellious and unconventional. Among his most successful projects for Olivetti: the Elea 9003, Italy’s first mainframe computer, and more famously the cherry red portable Valentine typewriter, a pop icon created in 1969 “for use in any place except the office, so as not to remind anyone of monotonous working hours,” as Sottsass once noted.Next to a great passion for art and literature he deeply admired American Abstract Expressionism and founded a literary magazine titled “Planeta Fresco” with Allen Ginsberg in the late ‘60s Sottsass loved to travel, and his journeys to India and East Asia from the early 1960s on would deeply impact his work and approach. After overcoming an unspecified, severe health issue, he went on to create his “Ceramics of Darkness” and “Ceramics of Shiva” series in the mid 1960s, prime examples of his artistic vision and drive to transcend the borders of art, pop, spirituality, and design with the help of bold shapes and color ombinations, while also seeking a deeper, mystical connection between form and meaning. The “Superboxes” from the late 1960s for Poltronova, closet-like sculptural structures from plywood covered in colorful stripes of laminate — then a novel and revolutionary material — also bore witness to Sottsass’s unique aesthetic curiosity and anarchistic sense for the comical.Sottsass was a devoted collaborator who joined forces with numerous protagonists of the Italian avant-garde, from Archizoom and Superstudio in the 1960s to the Alchymia group in the 1970s. In 1980, Alchymia’s Alessandro Mendini was among the founding members of Memphis. The group, which named itself after a Bob Dylan song that was playing at the initial meeting, soon made waves with frivolously colorful and outlandish furniture, lighting and interior design that set out to visually and intellectually counteract the sober modernist rationale. Despite the worldwide interest in Memphis, Sottsass left the group in 1985 to move on to new ventures with his architecture and design practice Sottsass Associati. He also returned to architecture: alongside industrial designs for Alessi, Vistosi, and Knoll, among others, he created shop interiors for Esprit and designed a number of private homes, though the most prestigious project of his late career would be Milan’s Malpensa Airport, which was realized in 2000. When Ettore Sottsass died in 2007, he left the world an impressive body of work covering architecture, furniture, industrial design, ceramics, glass, painting, photography and a wealth of writings. “Ettore was the last representative of an idea of design that was poetic and humanist,” fellow Memphis member and designer Aldo Cibic said after Sottsass’s death, adding that he was never cynical and never thought about money. “He was a free soul.— The article appears in the September 2017 edition of Modern Painters Read more
