Review of reviews: Art
Exhibit of the week
Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical
Met Breuer, New York City, through Oct. 8
Ettore Sottsass deserves as much blame as anyone for making the 1980s “the decade that style forgot,” said Janelle Zara in TheGuardian.com. The Italian architect and designer (1917–2007) was co-founder of the Memphis Group, a Milan-based collective that pioneered a “colorful, kitschy, and exaggerated” look that, for better or worse, came to define an era. Not long after the group unveiled its first exhibition of furniture and other household objects in 1981, the Memphis aesthetic was everywhere—in Karl Lagerfeld’s Monaco bedroom, in MTV’s logo, even in Bill Cosby’s sweaters. Still, the Met Breuer’s new Sottsass retrospective is no tongue-in-cheek revue of cartoonish coffee tables and shoulderpadded jackets the owners would rather forget. The show “cuts through the glare of ’80s DayGlo” to focus on the artistic philosophy behind such post-modernist artifacts, presenting Memphis not as a passing fad, but as “the culmination of one man’s decades-long mission to create a more spiritual approach to design.”
Modernism had been like mother’s milk to Sottsass, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. His father was a Viennese- trained architect, and after World War II the two pitched in to rebuild Italy by collaborating on designing low-cost slab-style houses and schools. The younger Sottsass went on to design one of modernism’s postwar classics: 1968’s fire-engine-red Olivetti Valentine typewriter, a study in form-follows-function economy. But by then Sottsass was feeling constrained by modernism’s confines. On trips abroad, he marveled at the totemic power of Indian sculpture and other non-Western art. He decided he no longer wanted to design soulless tools, but objects that elicited emotional responses. You can see him pushing toward the “exuberant wildness” of the Memphis look long before 1981, when he slyly merged sculpture, painting, and furniture in bold, colorful, playful works like his Carlton Room Divider. Love it or hate it, his 1980s furniture provokes a reaction—“ and you can’t write the history of late-20thcentury art without it.”
The Met “tries hard to put the designer in context,” said Julie Iovine in The Wall Street Journal. The show includes 85 of his works, and arranges them alongside a near-equal number of objects created by artists who were either peers or inspirations from distant lands and ages. But while it’s intriguing to see Aztec burial pots displayed with Sottsass’ zigzag-shaped ceramics, it’s diminishing to the insouciant charm of a tall, pin-striped 1970 Sottsass cabinet to see it standing next to one of Donald Judd’s ultraprecise stacked-box wall sculptures. Sottsass was never just a borrower or an apostate of modernism. He had a vision all his own: “He strove to invest his designs with the emotional impact and elemental clarity of a kiss.”
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paula Abreu Pita, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco ■
