Writer Camille Okhio. Photograph: Brian Ferry.
—By Camille Okhio
I write about interiors every day. To do it well, you have to understand a wide range of aesthetic styles. What makes an interior successful regardless of personal preference? How can you judge a maximalist interior with the same set of strictures as a minimalist one? There is no cut-and-dry solution. Good taste requires comprehension, but great taste requires elasticity. So, how to organize one’s thoughts? The most humane answer I have found so far is relationships. By definition, a relationship connects two or more concepts, objects, or people. Connection, of course, is what gives our lives meaning. Connection to each other, connection to the natural world and all that flows from it, connection to a place or thing. Memories, talismans, moments. So, it follows that the most successful interiors, the most rational, the most emotive, the most striking, are those that follow a rationale of relation.
Left: Tiffany Studios, Twelve-light candelabrum with snuffer, circa 1910. Right: Luciano Grassi, Sergio Conti and Marisa Forlani, "Artigianato" armchair, from the "Monofilo" series, circa 1955. Design New York.
In Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud wrote that “an artwork is a dot on a line.” If a Tiffany Studios Candelabrum from the early 20th century is one dot, what are the others that make up its line? The four gilt bronze arms that extend out of the candelabrum’s center carry a similar form to the lines of an “Artigianato” armchair from the Monofilo series of the Italian midcentury. Each bronze arm gently grows from the Tiffany candelabrum’s center like an octopus, sprouting three tentacles each, one for each candle, twelve in total. Like the sun rays that filter through a bright blue sea, favrile glass cabochons encircle each candle’s resting place.
The back, arms, and seat of the painted iron “Artigianato” chair reach up warmly like a group hug from its designers: Luciano Grassi, Sergio Conti, and Marisa Forlani, who worked together to create it. The human form is expressed in its lines — fittingly, considering its function — as are the digits of a cephalopod, fluid and flexible, extending and retracting to meet a myriad of needs. The nylon netting that supports the body at rest in the “Artigianato” chair has its own sea-faring connotations: entrapment, release, security.
The chair is radical in many ways. Designed in the 1950s, its innovation was recognized in a 1956 issue of Domus — itself offering a wildly inventive interpretation of modern and contemporary design. In 1985, it drew the attention of Andrea Branzi, recognized as one of the early fathers of Italian Postmodernism and co-founder of the Memphis Group, who included it in his and Michele De Lucchi’s book Il Design Italiano degli Anni ’50.
Roger Capron, Low table, 1960. Design New York.
The dark painted iron of the “Artigianato” chair carries the same tones as the patinated pewter covering on Roger Capron’s low table from the 1960s. On walnut legs, a circular surface rests, etched and decorated with the form of a four-legged creature — an image made up of hundreds of hammered dots, within a single dot, on a long line. The thin layer of pewter covers a wooden form. Capron eschewed his usual ceramic table tops here, with their tiles of leaves, flowers, and abstracted shapes, choosing to experiment with both material and composition in a way he rarely did. Where his other work is cream, beige, and light in tone, this table is heavy and dark, suggesting roots that extend into the earth.
Lucie Rie, Footed bowl, circa 1980. Design New York.
Coming, quite literally, from the earth, the clay of Lucie Rie’s footed bowl from the 1980s — thrown, glazed, and fired — reads as an offering plucked, already in its final form, directly from the ground beneath us. Rie, the master potter that she was, found new challenges and combinations to engage her inquisitive mind in each new decade she worked. In this vessel, she joined two mediums — terracotta, a red porous clay, and porcelain, made sometimes from clay, but more often than not, bone ash. Porcelain and terracotta fire and solidify at remarkably different temperatures.
Rie consciously set herself up to achieve a technical feat. Already had she mastered the fine walls, delicate feet, and fluted, long necks that set her apart in England’s midcentury studio pottery scene, but her mastery at the wheel was to be met with an intimate understanding of the science of ceramics — knowledge that could only be gained by creative thinking and tireless trial and error. Even in her later years, the work of a potter was not interesting to her without such experimentation.
The turquoise stripe encircling the bottom of the inside of the bowl, interrupting the golden manganese glaze that covers most of the vessel, calls to mind the aged bronzes of Herculaneum. T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings referenced the form of the ancient Greek Klismos chair in his chaise lounge from 1961. Manufactured, appropriately, by Saridis of Athens, Greece, the chaise’s back and legs follow the lines of the Klismos’s ancient form to a T.
T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, "Klismos" chaise lounge, circa 1961. Design New York.
Light and lyre-like, a classic Klismos chair’s legs all curve gently outwards, with a rounded back designed to support a human’s natural form in comfort. Robsjohn-Gibbings extended the seat of the original chair — depicted on a fifth-century stele and referenced in the eighth-century Iliad — to create a base that would support the full body, lifting legs and feet off the ground. In a way, this contemporary innovation on an ancient style doubled back, referencing the dining culture of the ancient Romans, who lay and leaned during mealtimes on sofas, rather than sitting up as modern diners do. A mirrored glass and painted steel table lamp by Serge Roche from the late 1930s calls to mind the African ancients, appearing as the crown of an Alexandrian obelisk. Staunchly Art Deco, the ancient suggestions in the lamp are met with the clean lines of the Machine Age.
Right: Serge Roche, Table lamp, 1939. Left: Josef Hoffmann, "Aufsatz" centerpiece, model no. M sh 17-1, designed 1924, executed 1925-1931. Design New York.
More loosely ancient in form is Josef Hoffmann’s Aufsatz centerpiece, a brass vessel which owes its two-armed form to the amphorae of the ancient Mediterranean world. Where a traditional amphora’s neck is narrow, Hoffmann’s vessel opens wide: a willing receptacle. Designed in 1924 and executed within the following seven years, the Wiener Werkstätte centerpiece’s only decorations are the ridges that cover its surface, following the Austrian movement’s “form follows function” ideology.
Left: Dagobert Peche, Four-piece coffee and tea service, circa 1923. Right: Hans Coper, "Cycladic" pot with spherical volume and oval lip, circa 1972. Design New York.
Dagobert Peche’s coffee and tea service from the same period carries similar lines, albeit diagonally, rather than vertically. The milky, ivorine arms of Peche’s coffee and tea pots share the same hue, if not texture, as Hans Coper’s “Cycladic” pot: a pocket of porcelain that sits precariously, connected by a tenuous few centimeters of clay to a rotund columnar base. Coper was a pupil and intimate of Rie’s: another dot connected on a line.
Left: Angelo Lelii, Ceiling light, circa 1959. Right: Line Vautrin, "Folie" or "Le Soleil à Rendez-vous avec la Lune" mirror, circa 1959. Design New York.
The ivorine leaves that sit adrift on Peche’s coffee and tea pots appear as if frozen mid-gust of wind. Yearning for movement, I imagine them jealous of the mobile glass drops that finish Angelo Lelii’s ceiling light from the late 1950s. Like wind chimes, the red glass drops sway and tinkle with the slightest touch. The aluminium shade to Lelii’s light is painted a sunshine yellow — explicitly symbolic for a lamp. The sun finds representation again in a Line Vautrin “Folie” mirror from the 1950s, whose irregular rays curl outwards from the mirror’s center.
A whole galaxy of dots, a solar system of connections, are found in just one corner of Phillips’ upcoming design sale. Of the wide-ranging materials, periods, regions, and makers, not one stands alone. Different estimates relate to different forms of value — historical, material, technical, rarity, or collective desire. And yet, of all the lots available, none takes precedence over another. Looking relationally allows the viewer to consider aesthetics through a non-hierarchical lens. Provenance, facts, and research are the bedrock of an impressive and informed collection, but an inspired collection grows from that, equalizing the personal with the scholarly.
By inventing context around objects from a consciously personal place, we emphasize the power of connection and make an argument for a language and system of value based on emotion, memory, and individual experience. A system of value that can morph and grow and delight over time. One that can live, easily surviving the trends and trials of time.
About the writer:
New York-based writer and curator Camille Okhio is Senior Design Editor at Elle Decor. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, W Magazine, Architectural Digest, Apartamento, and more.
Discover more from Design New York >