Ettore Sottsass / 'Carlton' Room Divider / 1981

Ettore Sottsass
'Carlton' Room Divider
1981
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Creator Name: Sottsass, Ettore
Creator Nationality: European; Southern European; Italian
Creator Role: Designer
Creator Dates/Places: Italian, born 1917
Creator Name-CRT: Ettore Sottsass
Creator Name: Memphis, Milano
Creator Role: Manufacturer
Creator Dates/Places: Italian
Creator Name-CRT: Manufacturer: Memphis Milano
Title: 'Carlton' Room Divider
View: Full View
Creation Start Date: 1981
Creation End Date: 1981
Creation Date: 1981
Object Type: Decorative Arts and Utilitarian Objects
Classification Term: Furniture
Materials and Techniques: Wood, plastic laminate
Dimensions: H. 76-3/4, W. 74-3/4, D. 15-3/4 in. (194.9 x 189.9 x 40 cm)
AMICA Contributor: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Owner Location: New York, New York, USA
ID Number: 1997.460.1ab
Credit Line: John C. Waddell Collection, Gift of John C. Waddell, 1997
Rights: http://www.metmuseum.org/
Context:

Sottsass is not only one of the most influential designers of the latter half of the twentieth century but also one of the most paradoxical. While he has had a successful career producing industrial designs for the mainstream corporation Olivetti, for everything from typewriters and computers to office landscapes, he has also been iconoclastic as well, creating strikingly unconventional consumer-oriented objects that challenge the bourgeois audience at which they are aimed to reassess its assumptions of the limits of 'good taste.'

Between 1981 and 1988 Sottsass and a small international group of like-minded designers who called themselves Memphis, created nonconformist furniture. The totemic 'Carleton' room divider is an outstanding example of his Memphis designs. Although intended for a luxury market and of fine workmanship, it is made of cheap plastic laminates rather than fine woods. The vivid colors and seemingly random interplay of solids and voids suggest avant-garde painting and sculpture. Yet, typical of Sottsass, underlying the surface brilliance is an entirely logical structural system, of real and implied equilateral triangles.

AMICA ID: MMA_.1997.460.1ab
AMICA Library Year: 2000
Media Metadata Rights: Copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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