The Carlton bookcase. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
How do you make Ettore Sottsass’s bed?
Ettore Sottsass, 1974 Courtesy Studio Ettore Sottsass
That was the question facing curator Christian Larsen, who placed Sottsass’s 1992 couch, with a scrolling pearwood footboard and a headboard textured like a high block wall, at the end of the new Met Breuer retrospective of the Italian architect’s work, “Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical.” Should he play up the fairytale aspect of sleeping in a castle with a white fur counterpane? Or go with something more monkish?
In the end, the answer became clear: you make it “very plainly.” White sheets and a single pillow. The ascetic as king.
The question of bedclothes is not trivial to understanding the work of Sottsass, who would have been 100 this year (he died a decade ago, in 2007). Best known as the ringleader of Memphis, the short-lived and wildly patterned design collective that defines 1980s style, Sottsass was perpetually tweaking the nose of modernism while embracing its machines, its manufacturers, and even its colors.
He built totems like standing stones while travelling like a nomad, made plastic rare by putting it into the hands of skilled craftsmen. He made expensive objects of dubious tastewhile seeking to make furniture that “is of absolutely no importance to us.” He owned his contradictions; Sottsass curates himself.