Art Center Heralds Italy’s Postwar Design Renaissance

Most arguments don’t make much sense to outsiders. Take, for example, Art Center College of Design’s current exhibition, “Masterworks: Italian Design, 1960-1994.” It presents some 145 examples of furniture, glass, metal and ceramics plus techno stuff like high-intensity lamps, telephones and typewriters. Remember typewriters?

The exhibition--handsomely installed by Williamson Gallery director Stephen Nowlin--was organized as a traveling show by the Denver Art Museum. It demonstrates and celebrates Italy’s rise to a design-world superpower. According to a catalog essay by curator R. Craig Miller, Italy’s design renaissance was fueled by an argument. The ideological opponents were the Modernists vs. the Anti-Modernists.

The dispute certainly existed and was hotly contested. To an outsider, however, it looks like one of those controversies that are more about keeping creative juices flowing than proving the justice of canonical details. To an outsider, this work looks like the production of two barely distinguishable groups of individuals each trying to find slightly different ways out of the same dilemma.

With most of Europe in shambles after World War II, Scandinavia and the U.S. took the lead in Modern design. Their simple, pristine products were initially refreshing, eventually antiseptic. By 1960 international formal Modernism felt musty and academic. Everybody was looking for a way to revitalize art. American’s solution was Pop. Italy’s was the Baroque.

Virtually every work here looks like the 17th century Italian sensibility filtered through the updating time-machine of Modernism. There’s at least one telling example of a human proclivity to hang onto the past while advancing to the technological future.

In 1967, Richard Sapper and Marco Zanuso designed a one-piece telephone called the “Grillo.” Its folding mouthpiece predicts today’s cellular phones, but its dial is circular even though the numbers are push-buttons.

This tendency to retain carriage-style running-boards even when autos made them obsolete provides a kind of motif for the whole exhibition. Much of the furniture, for example, is rendered in downscale materials, but none of it can resist the Baroque urge to swelling opulence, heaving curves, brinkmanship attenuation, sensational illusionism, pyrotechnical color and materials as mixed metaphors.

The glass work is more sophisticated than the stuff tourists buy in Venice, but it leans to the same operatic ebullience. Work from the ‘60s is still relatively restrained by the strictures of Modernism, but it’s pushing the envelope. The “Blow” armchair by Donato D’Urbino, Jonathan De Pas and Paolo Lomazzi is an inflatable clear-plastic seat that impersonates the pillows of an overstuffed easy chair. Widely copied in the U.S., it has a disposable pop-culture flavor that delighted hippies. In 1970, the same trio of designers came up with a couch named “Joe.” It’s a giant leather baseball mitt presumably intended to ignite cozy populist nostalgia in Joe-Six-Packs who can afford it. This is Baroque Pop.

So are a pair of couch-size white-vinyl pillows with wavy tops. Designed by the group Archizoom, this ambiguous “Superonda” seating might prove useful to adventurous lovers. Other designs manage to be both more artistically refined and loonier. The group Studio 65 made a foam couch shaped like an ancient Greek column capitol. Alessandro Mendini’s 1979 “Kandissi” sofa turns Kandinsky into funky Art Deco. Speaking of which, there’s a very nice Ettore Sottsass silver centerpiece bowl that makes affectionate fun of Zig-Zag Moderne. There’s almost no irony in an elegant molded glass 1987 “Ghost” armchair by Cini Boeri and Tomu Katayanagi. It’s like a respectful homage to both classic Modernism and, if you like, evanescent California Light and Space Conceptualism.

Quite a number of these designers are equally well-known as architects. Even though they got a certain amount of permission from American Pop, they took it in a significantly different direction. Simply by casting their work as nominally functional design, they both predicted and then captured the Postmodernist sensibility that is in itself Neo-Baroque.

Historically, Baroque acted as a form of reassurance in a Catholic world rocked by the Protestant Reformation. Similarly the stylized Moderne of the 1920s and ‘30s provided visual entertainment to a darkening culture. Given the curious combination of affluence and instability of the past two decades, it should come as no surprise that the Postmodern world should embrace art that is the plastic equivalent of musical comedy.

*

* Art Center College of Design, Williamson Gallery, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, through Dec. 21. Closed Mondays and holidays. (818) 396-2244.