ETTORE SOTTSASS: CERAMICS
Bruno Bischofberger [Editor]
Bruno Bischofberger [Editor]: ETTORE SOTTSASS: CERAMICS. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. First edition. Quarto. Black cloth titled in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Decorated endpapers. 179 pp. 116 color illustrations. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A fine copy in a fine dustjacket.
9.75 x 12 hardcover book with 179 pages with 116 full-color illustrations. Over some six decades beginning in the late 1940s, Ettore Sottsass worked to restore a sense of humanity to a field that had all but sacrificed it to function. Arguably he is best known today for his central role in the Memphis group, a collective of designers that used a visual vocabulary of ungainly forms, off colors, and deliberately tasteless, clashing prints like an eye roll or ironic turn of phrase. But Sottsass’s interests went far beyond visual wit and deadpan delivery. He mined human history and experience for touchstones as diverse as contemporary art, ancient architecture, traditional craft, and Eastern spiritualism to cultivate a design language that was often as sober as it was spirited, as profound as it was playful. This is most apparent in his ceramics, a medium he discovered in 1955.
“If there is a reason for the existence of design, it is that it manages to give—or give anew—instruments and things this sacred charge for which […] men enter the sphere of ritual, meaning life.” — Ettore Sottsass
By the late 1950s Sottsass was already being recognized as a formidable talent and a design polymath. He became the art director of Poltronova, a newly established Italian furniture manufacturer known for producing work by young designers associated with the Radical Design movement. The period also marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with Olivetti that saw Sottsass design the Elea 9003 mainframe computer, for which he would be awarded the Compasso d’Oro, Italy’s highest achievement in design. In 1957 Sottsass realized his first series of ceramics for Bitossi, an Italian ceramics manufacturer, for distribution by the New York-based importer Raymor. Invited by Raymor and Bitossi to design the line in 1955, Sottsass was immediately attracted to the medium.
Sottsass spent two years experimenting with the medium before his designs were produced, and the resulting work, the Ceramiche di Lava (Lava Ceramics), established qualities that would guide his ceramics for decades.
The Lava series shows the designer manipulating the basic qualities of the clay, pairing fields of smooth glaze against sections with a coarse and porous finish resembling lava rock, and offsetting neutral tones with acid colored glaze, daubed on, edges uneven. The pieces are pleasingly curved and substantial, with a visual heft that signals durability and utilitarianism. Their forms also have a deliberately primordial character. In a 1970 issue of Domus Sottsass wrote of “ancient bowls with very primeval colors or ancient goblets, goblets like the ones maybe used in Mycenae or in Galilee or in Ur or any other place, to drink water gushing from a spring. It seemed to me then that it was possible to rediscover archetypal forms (and I’m not talking about essential forms, because the essence makes us think of an ideal state or a more or less Platonic metaphysical absolute, and not of archetypal forms), in other words, forms discovered by humanity at the dawn of time and that are deeply embedded in its history.”
Sottsass’s interest in archetypal forms would persist through several more series, including 1959’s Bianco/Nero (White/ Black)—pieces composed of striped and gridded cylinders and bowls assembled in various combinations that resemble a child’s interpretations of bottles and cups; and Rocchetti e Isolatori (Reels and Insulators) in 1962, glossy ceramics inspired by spools and electrical insulators. The title of a 1967 exhibition of large-scale ceramic objects, Menhir, Ziggurat, Stupas, Hydrants & Gas Pumps, suggests the designer culling inspiration from a range of sources—from ancient monoliths to contemporary cityscapes—and transmuting it into large ceramic totem poles, some more than two meters tall, composed of separate discs—like giant Life Savers—in brilliant colors and graphic patterns stacked one atop an- other on a metal pole. For two series in the late 1960s—Tantra, 1968, and Yantra, 1969—Sottsass looked to Hindu spiritualism, translating tantric diagrams into ceramic vessels. Rendered in three dimensions, the concentric circles and triangles echo the steps of a ziggurat, or the radiating, reverberating forms of art deco.
While Sottsass chiefly designed for serial production, he hand-made two sets of ceramic objects that transcended formal references to express a more profound and personal spiritual outlook. He completed the first, Ceramiche delle Tenebre (Darkness Ceramics), in 1963 while convalescing from a severe illness contracted during a trip to India. A series of large cylinders glazed in black, muted blues, and burnished bronzes, platinums, and golds, with a motif of circles—full moon and eclipsed—the pieces are both a reflection of the bleakness of this period and a rumination on our connection to the universe. Sottsass created the following series, Offerta a Shiva (Offerings to Shiva), dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva, who embodied both destruction and regeneration, to mark his return to good health. In flesh and earth tones, ochers, pinks, and oranges, with incised circles representing the cosmos, the mood of the plates is more reverent gratitude than jubilant celebration. “They’re almost a meditative reflection on mandalas, on Hindu iconography,” Benda says, “but at the same time, there’s nothing in [the series] that seems repetitive. If you saw all of them you wouldn’t once feel that you’ve seen that motif before.”
“With my work […] in the end I try to be the least modern possible, and as timeless and spaceless as possible to get people to acknowledge the presence of objects,” Sottsass wrote in 1964, declaring his design manifesto but also his world view. “Not as consumer goods, but as instruments of a possible ritual—if we can make a ritual out of life.” — Jenny Florence
Ettore Sottsass (Italian, 1917 - 2007) was an Italian architect and designer whose body of work included furniture, jewelry, glass, lighting and office machine design. He was educated at the Politecnico di Torino in Turin and graduated in 1939 with a degree in architecture. He served in the Italian military and spent much of World War II in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. After returning home in 1948, he set up his own architectural and industrial design studio in Milan.
In 1956 Ettore Sottsass began working as a design consultant for Olivetti, designing office equipment, typewriters and furniture. Sottsass was hired by Adriano Olivetti, the founder, to work alongside his son, Roberto. There Sottsass made his name as a designer who, through colour, form and styling, managed to bring office equipment into the realm of popular culture. Sottsass, Mario Tchou, and Roberto Olivetti won the prestigious 1960 Compasso d’Oro with the Elea 9003, the first Italian mainframe computer.
Throughout the 1960s, Sottsass traveled in the US and India and designed more products for Olivetti, culminating in the bright red plastic portable Valentine typewriter in 1970, which became a fashion accessory. Sotsass described the Valentine as "a brio among typewriters." Compared with the typical drab typewriters of the day, the Valentine was more of a design statement item than an office machine.
While continuing to design for Olivetti in the 1960s, Sottsass developed a range of objects which were expressions of his personal experiences traveling in the United States and India. These objects included large altar-like ceramic sculptures and his "Superboxes", radical sculptural gestures presented within a context of consumer product, as conceptual statement. Covered in bold and colorful, simulated custom laminates, they were precursors to Memphis, a movement which came more than a decade later. Around this time Sottsass said “I didn’t want to do any more consumerist products, because it was clear that the consumerist attitude was quite dangerous.”
The feeling that his creativity was being stifled by corporate work is documented in his 1973 essay “When I was a Very Small Boy.”As a result, his work from the late 60s to the 70s was defined by experimental collaborations with younger designers such as Superstudio and Archizoom, and association with the Radical movement, culminating in the foundation of Memphis at the turn of the decade.
In 1981, Sottsass and an international group of young architects and designers came together to form the Memphis Group. A night of drinking and listening to Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" gave the group its name. Memphis was launched with a collection of 40 pieces of furniture, ceramics, lighting, glass and textiles which featured fluorescent colors, slick surfaces, intentionally lop-sided shapes and squiggly laminate patterns
. The group's colorful, ironic pieces were hailed as one of the most characteristic examples of Post-modernism in design and the arts. Sottsass described Memphis in a 1986 Chicago Tribune article: “Memphis is like a very strong drug. You cannot take too much. I don't think anyone should put only Memphis around: It's like eating only cake.”
Whilst the Memphis movement in the eighties attracted enormous attention world wide for its energy and flamboyance, Ettore Sottsass began assembling a major design consultancy which he named Sottsass Associati. The studio was established in 1980 and gave the possibility to build architecture on a substantial scale as well as to design for large international industries.
Sottsass Associati, primarily an architectural practice, also designed elaborate stores and showrooms for Esprit, identities for Alessi, exhibitions, interiors, consumer electronics in Japan and furniture of all kinds. The studio was based on the cultural guidance of Ettore Sottsass and the work conducted by its many young associates, who often left to open their own studios. Sottsass Associati is presently based in London and Milan and continue to sustain the work, philosophy and culture of the studio.
As an industrial designer, his clients included Fiorucci, Esprit, the Italian furniture company Poltronova, Knoll International, Serafino Zani, Alessi and Brondi. As an architect, he designed the Mayer-Schwarz Gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, with its dramatic doorway made of irregular folds and jagged angles, and the home of David M. Kelley, designer of Apple's first computer mouse, in Woodside, California. In the mid-1990s he designed the sculpture garden and entry gates of the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg Gallery at the campus of Cal Poly Pomona. He collaborated with well-known figures in the architecture and design field, including Aldo Cibic, James Irvine, Matteo Thun.
Sottsass had a vast body of work; furniture, jewellery, ceramics, glass, silver work, lighting, office machine design and buildings which inspired generations of architects and designers. In 2006 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held the first major museum survey exhibition of his work in the United States. A retrospective exhibition, Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress, was held at the Design Museum in London in 2007. In 2009, the Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht presented a re-construction of a Sottsass' exhibition 'Miljö för en ny planet' (Landscape for a new planet), which took place in the National Museum in Stockholm in 1969.