Carlo Mollino - Design New York Wednesday, June 9, 2010 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Lutrario Ballroom, Turin; Galerie Downtown, Paris

  • Literature

    Fulvio Ferrari, Carlo Mollino Cronaca, Turin, 1985, p. 140, fig. 234; Giovanni Brino, Carlo Mollino: Architecture as Autobiography, Milan, 1987, pp. 145-146; Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, The Furniture of Carlo Mollino, New York, 2006, p. 153, figs. 267-268 and 270 and pp. 154-155, fig. 272; Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, eds., Carlo Mollino Arabesques, exh. cat., Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Milan, 2007, pp. 95-97

  • Artist Biography

    Carlo Mollino

    Italian • 1905 - 1973

    Carlo Mollino made sexy furniture. His style may have grown out of the whiplash curves of Art Nouveau, but the sinuous lines of his furniture were more humanoid than vegetal, evoking arched backs and other body parts. Mollino was also an avid aviator, skier and racecar driver — he designed his own car for Le Mans. His love of speed and danger comes across in his designs, which MoMA curator Paola Antonelli has described as having "frisson."

    Mollino had no interest in industrial design and the attendant constraints of material costs and packaging. His independent wealth allowed him to pick and choose projects, resulting in an oeuvre of unique, often site-specific works that were mostly executed by the Turin joinery firm Apelli & Varesio. Apart from a coffee table that he designed in 1950 for the American company Singer & Sons, his furniture never went into production. Notwithstanding the support of Gio Ponti, Mollino's design contemporaries largely dismissed him as an eccentric outsider. However, the combination of scarcity (Mollino only made several hundred works in his lifetime), exquisite craftsmanship and idiosyncratic "frisson" has rightly placed Carlo Mollino in the highest tier of twentieth-century design collecting.

    View More Works

173

Set of ten "Lutrario" chairs, from the Lutrario Ballroom, Turin

1959
Painted tubular iron, painted iron, Resinflex upholstery, bent oak plywood, brass.
Each: 29 3/4 in. (75.6 cm.) high.
Produced by Doro, Italy.  Back of each chair with decal “DORO/CUNEO” and three additionally with paper label “SC INTERNATIONAL/poltrone & arredi” (10).

Estimate
$25,000 - 30,000 

Sold for $31,250

Design

9 June 2010
New York