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Sculpture | Ruth Asawa: Line as Form

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

Ruth Asawa: Objects & Apparitions
Christie’s Private Sales
Rockefeller Center
New York City, USA
Exhibition 6th -31st May, 2013

Associated with the formulation of modernism, the concept of line as form is an ineffable paradox that was first explored at the Bauhaus in the 1920s and early 30s. Unlikely then, in 1947, for high-school graduate Ruth Asawa, to stumble upon a language that expressed the complex notion in the looped-wire baskets used for selling eggs in Mexico’s markets. But the promising and curious student, born in 1926 of Japanese immigrant parents, who had grown up during The Great Depression and began studying drawing and painting with professional Japanese artists in the internment camps, where she and her family were confined during World War II, had already travelled to Mexico two years earlier to study Spanish and Mexican Art, and by the time her return visit came around had come under the influence of former Bauhaus master Josef Albers and architect Buckminster Fuller, both teachers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she had enrolled. ‘The artist must discover the uniqueness and integrity of the material’, Albers had explained, and intrigued with the idea of experimenting with wire as a medium, Asawa began to loop and twist it in a similar fashion to the Mexican basket makers, producing 3D forms – essentially, drawings in space – made from a single continuous wire. ‘I was interested in wire sculpture because of the economy of a line,’ Asawa said, ‘making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent.’ Many of these sculptures were designed to be hung from the ceiling, and later Asawa hit upon the idea of creating transparent forms within the transparent forms, increasing the complexity and playfulness of her creations.

It wasn’t until 1953 that Asawa began exhibiting her work – in the meantime having been married and given birth to two of the six children she would have by 1959 – in solo and group shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Modern Art and at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time she had met and formed a life-long friendship with legendary photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883 -1976). Cunningham, famed for her images of flowers, nudes and industrial landscapes, sensitively captured the sublime lightness and fluidity of Asawa’s work in still life compositions. She produced many pictures of the artist working, as well portraits in which Asawa becomes an element inextricably enmeshed with the sculptural forms of her creations.

In the 1960s, Asawa received major commissions to make public art and in 1970, her work was exhibited in the American Pavilion at the Osaka World’s Fair. So well-established as an artist was she by the early 70s that her sculpture and paintings began being shown in a string of retrospectives at important US venues – San Francisco Museum of Art (1973), Fresno Art Center (1978 and 2001). Asawa is reprented by the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco. Virtually unknown in Europe, in New York, her work can be found in major collections including that of the Solomon R Guggenheim and Whitney Museum of American Art; Objects & Apparations is her first major solo show in the city in over 50 years. Forty-eight works, including sculpture and works on paper – for sale or for private loan – will be presented in a show that takes place in the elevated setting of the 20th floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas, at Rockefeller Center. Christie’s will offer the sculpture Untitled, above, from the Ruth Asawa Family Collection at their May 15th Post-War and Contemporary Art evening sale.

Imogen Cunningham photographs from top
Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, 1956
(Ruth Holding a Form-Within-Form, 1952)

Untitled
Hanging, six-lobed, multi-layered continuous form within a form
Estimate $250-350,000 (£160-225,000)

Ruth Asawa 2, 1957

All photos: archive pictures ©Imogen Cunningham
Courtesy Christie’s New York

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Architecture + Design | Eileen Gray: One-off

Friday, February 22nd, 2013

Eileen Gray
Centre Pompidou
Paris, France
20th February – 20th May, 2013

Gliding up the escalator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, one looks down on the Digital Space on the mezzanine level, where friendly, comfortable, and exceedingly stylish Bibendum chairs mingle effortlessly, despite their bulk, with the glowing computer screens. Anyone can sit down on one but at a retail price of £2,215/€2,563/$3,380, few could afford to buy one. Aptly named after the Michelin tyre company’s symbol, Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair was designed principally, as a one-off. The same can be said of her furniture for E1027, the modernist holiday home she built with her lover, Jean Badovici, at Roquebrune Cap Martin in the south of France between 1926 and 1929. Had it not been for English furniture manufacturer, Zeev Aram, who was responsible for reviving her reputation during the 1970s, when she was almost entirely forgotten, Gray’s other classic designs for furniture, rugs and lighting may never have gone into mass-production. E1027, too, which fell into a decrepit state, may also easily have slipped into oblivion.

‘Eileen Gray ranks among the architects and designers who have left a significant mark on the 20th centuty,’ asserts the press release for the eponymously titled, long-overdue, eponymously titled retrospective that opened this week at Paris’s Centre Pompidou. But, although it reflects many of the trends, debates and dilemmas of the early 20th century, her legacy of buildings and furniture is small in comparison to that of her contemporaries, such as Le Corbusier. Indeed, some even lay the blame for this at Le Corbusier’s door. Director Mary McGuckian’s The Price of Desire, in which Winona Ryder take the lead role as Eileen Gray is scheduled to begin shooting this summer at E1027, where painstaking renovations are almost complete. The story is based around the controversial belief that Le Corbusier, (played by Vincent Perez) effectively effaced Gray’s contribution to modern architecture. Badovici had kept E1027 after his and Gray’s split in 1932 and to Gray’s astonishmernt and anger, invited Le Corbusier, by then a regular visitor, to decorate its walls with murals in his characteristic, crude, Picasso-esque style – which he customarily executed while nude. While others have interpreted this as an act of envy and covetousness, Gray called it vandalism. It could also be true that she considered the subject matter as critical of her bisexual lifestyle. Apparently, in 1949, Le Corbusier went on to published photographs of the the murals without accrediting the house – vaguely described as being ‘at Cap Martin’ – to Gray, and not himself, thus providing the tenuous crux of the forthcoming film’s plot. It ignores that fact that, shortly after it’s completion and after spending a few days there, Le Corbusier sent Gray a postcard extolling its ‘rare spirit… so dignified, so charming and full of wit,’ and that in 1936 he invited her to show within his Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux at the Paris Exposition Internationale, where she presented her plans for a holiday centre, after which she appears to have gone into effective retirement.

Gray, born into an arty, Irish, aristocratic family had studied fine art at at the Slade in London. Bored, in 1902, she moved to turn-of-the-century Paris, plunging headlong into the hedonistic lifestyle and sexually-ambiguous milieu. Her apartment, at 21 Rue Bonaparte, was to remain her principal home until her death in 1976. On an extended visit to London, to be with her ill mother, she learned the art of lacquering. perfecting the skill on her return to Paris, where she started to produce high quality lacquered furniture with a craftsman-like finish in the style later to be called Art deco. As her confidence grew, she began to design whole commissioned rooms down to the smallest detail, listing Elsa Schiaparelli among her clients. However, on her return to Paris from England after World War I, during which she had spent time working as a nurse and discovered a social conscience, Gray became dissatisfied with the the type of work she was producing. At this point she met fell in love with Jean Badovici, a Romanian émigré, studying architecture in Paris and involved in the production of several avant-garde magazines. Coming into contact with the highly influential Dutch De Stijl group, whose projects included the design of social housing, she decided to become an architect. Badovici, aware of her wealth, suggested that he should write a brief for a house that she might build for him. She leapt at the idea, and immediately began searching for a suitable site in the south, where they might escape prying eyes. Badovici would provide the necessary technical support, which she, having had no formal training as an architect, lacked.

The Roquebrune Cap Martin villa site, an idyllic setting on the edge of a rocky outcrop, a few miles east of Monaco, may have come as a recommendation via Le Corbusier’s wife, Yvonne, who was Monégasque, so he might already have been familiar with the location, where he was to spend every August for the next 18 years, building his famous and idiosyncratic cabanon close by, as well as a small group of modular holiday homes, the Unités de Camping. Eventually, in 1965, he died there while swimming in the bay below. The powerful Paris-based Fondation Le Corbusier won the argument over whether his murals would be painted over – they will be remain and are being restored.

Despite her claimed social conscience, Gray only ever got around to building her compact but luxury villa E1027, and another larger one for herself, Tempe a Pailla (1934), overlooking Menton. Le Corbusier had been commissioned to build his first recognisably modernist house, The Amédée Ozenfant House and Studio, in Paris, in 1922. His Villa le Lac (1923), at Coreaux, Switzerland, destined to be the home his parents, has a free, adaptable floor plan, sliding, room-length windows looking out over the lake (although not floor-to-ceiling height), a flat roof that could be used as a sitting-out area and a garden terrace – all strikingly similar to E1027. Just before work on E1027 was started, Le Corbusier’s adjoining luxury Villas Jeanneret and La Roche, in Paris, (now housing the Foundation Le Corbusier Museum) were completed, in 1925. He designed many other luxury houses in the late 1920s and early 1930s, notably Villa Savoye (1931). His first apartment block was completed in 1926. In 1929, he built the Cité de Refuge, for the Armée du Salut (The Salvation Army), in Paris. His output continued and was stupendous. Many years later, Le Corbusier’s landmark social housing project the Unité d’Habitation (Housing Unit), in Marseille, France, was completed in 1952.

Gray’s Art deco pieces are remarkable and have a sensitivity and human quality which was totally new to furniture design that she somehow clung on to and carried through to the modernist items she designed for E1027 and Tempe a Pailla. Her E1027 table and Bibendum armchair were inspired by the recent tubular steel experiments of Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus (who had been inspired, himself, by Mart Stam – a prominent socialist), while the Transat chair pays tribute to Gerrit Rietveld but avoids his uninviting rigidity of form.

Original Eileen Gray furniture does not come cheap. In a Christie’s auction in 2009, an art deco Snake armchair from Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s collection fetched £18,930/€21,905,000/$28,238,000. Along with the villa, Badovici had retained the furniture. After his death in 1956, both were apparently well looked after by a the next owner, a Madame Schelbert. Fortunately, when Dr Kägi, who bought the property in 1982 (he was later murdered there by his gardener in 1996) decided to sell off the furniture for €390,000 the Centre Pompidou exercised its right of pre-emption on the sale and bought the most important items, which are on display in the current exhibition. The chairs and other items of furniture at the restored villa are being donated by Zeev Aram. Visitors are unlikely to be allowed to sit on them.

Photographs from top
Panelled screen by Eileen Gray, 1919-1922
Black lacquered wood
Special collection, courtesy Galerie Vallois, Paris
© Photo Vallois-Paris-Arnaud Carpentier

Portrait of Eileen Gray, Paris, 1926, Berenice Abbot
©Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics

View of the salon at villa E 1027, built by Eileen Gray
and Jean Badovici between 1926 and 1929
Centre Pompidou, Bibliothèque Kandinsky
Estate of Eileen Gray
Photo Alan Irvine

Bibendum armchair by Eileen Gray, circa 1930
Chrome, leather
Private Collection, Mme Tachard
©Photo Christian Baraja, Studio SLB

View of the southern façade of Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici’s
villa E1027, from the sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France
Centre Pompidou, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris
Estate of Eileen Gray/Guy Carrard

View from the lake of Villa le Lac, built by Le Corbusier in
1923 at Corseaux, Switzerland


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Design | Modernism and Stained Glass

Friday, December 14th, 2012

Important 20th Century Decorative Art & Design
Christie’s, New York,
Rockefeller Plaza,
New York City, USA
14th December 2012

The Avery Coonley Playhouse windows, circa 1912, with their buoyant circles and patriotic flags, that stand out for their distinctive, asymmetrical composition and vibrant color, are considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece in glass. The building, a small structure created by Lloyd Wright to serve as a school for Queenie Ferrie Coonley to educate local children, was a short distance from the Coonley’s home in Riverside, Illinois, that Wright had previously completed for the couple in 1908. Just one of the 40 original windows – sadly, all of them were removed in the 1950s to be replaced by replicas – that ringed the main school room and were designed to encourage a spontaneous, playful air, is included in Christie’s Important 20th Century Decorative Art & Design sale. His use of bright red, green, blue, orange and black glass was, by all accounts, inspired by a passing parade, complete with confetti, balloons and American flags. The European abstract art movement, including the paintings of Sonia and Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky, which Wright saw in Paris on his European sojourn in 1909-1910, that included a trip to Vienna, significantly influenced the designs.

A stained glass revival had been triggered in Holland in the 1850s, when William Morris’s ideas gained currency there, and a domestic demand emerged for non-figurative, decorative art that accorded with strict Calvinist principles. Via the De Stijl movement founded in the Netherlands in 1917, this late 19th century trend would evolve into abstract stained glass panels. That year, leading member, Theo van Doesburg, completed a set of five identical windows, strikingly geometrical in style, whose motif was abstracted from skating figures, for a house designed by fellow member, Jan Wils. In 1918, Van Doesburg began collaborating with another member, architect JJP Oud, on his first municipal housing blocks at Spangen, designing stained glass panels for each apartment – some are still in place, others, inevitably, as van Doesburg’s reputation as an artist grew and his work became much sought after, were sold off. Later, in 1934, another significant Dutch architect, Jan Kuyt, designed intricate stained glass skylights for his V&D Department Store building in Amersfoort.

From the same early period, Josef Albers’ Red and White, 1923, created for that year’s first Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar – sadly, since destroyed – was a stained-glass window that was granted a title, in the style of an artwork.

Of course, stained glass had been around for many centuries before the early modernists, recognising its potential, took hold of it and adapted it to suit their buildings, in the process turning it into an art form. And, although its popularity during the 20th century swung in and out of fashion, it never really went away.

In a note on an early drawing of the Glass Pavilion – the pineapple-shaped temporary building that German expressionist architect, Bruno Taut, erected at the Cologne Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition in 1914 – a prismatic glass dome structure of concrete and glass, he said he made it in the spirit of a gothic cathedral. Inlaid coloured glass plates on the façade acted as mirrors. Inside, there were floor-to-celing, coloured glass walls and a glass-treaded metal staircases led to the upper projection room that showed a kaleidoscope of colors. But when, some 40 years later, Le Corbusier built Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp in France, between 1950 and 1955 – in which daylight enters via a system of openings covered with glass, much of it coloured – the architect was keen to maintain that his glass had no connection to stained glass, which he considered a form of illumination too closely bound to archaic architectural notions, with particular reference to Romanesque and Gothic art.

At Fondation Maeght, Saint Paul de Vence, on the French Riviera, a small chapel, next to the main building, has stained glass windows designed by Braque in the 1960s. More contemporary examples include a stained-glass window installed at Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy restaurant in Notting Hill, London, during the 1990s.

Two other windows by Lloyd Wright are included in the Christie’s sale, alongside a skylight and panel made by Louis Sullivan in 1890 for the Auditorium building, Chicago. Meanwhile, a set of four square windows (26.9 x 26.9 cm) of graphic, abstract design, in opalescent, cathedral and slumped glass, produced in 1880 by American painter and muralist John la Farge, and estimated to sell at $8,000 – 12,000, are on offer at Sotheby’s, New York, in their Important 20th Century Design sale on 15th December.

Images from top
Window from the Avery Cooonley Playhouse, Frank Lloyd Wright, circa 1912
(Detail, the complete framed panel is also shown above)
Leaded glass, with original oak window frame, 61 x 97 cm
Estimate $200,000 – $300,000

Photo © Christie’s Images Limited, 2012

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Art | Lucy Williams’ Pavilion

Friday, December 7th, 2012

Lucy Williams: Pavilion
Timothy Taylor Gallery
London, United Kingdom
Until 11th January, 2013

The patina of age that gently creeps across more traditional buildings, imbuing them with a sense of cosiness, doesn’t sit happily on many surviving 20th century modernist buildings – it probably won’t, as they begin to age, on those of the 21st. The effect is somehow alien to the utopian concept underpinning each structure, and besides, it doesn’t suit the concrete, glass and steel materials. Artist Lucy Williams has set herself the task of looking back at the original buildings and via intricately-constructed, scaled-down and not quite 2D representations of the whole or details, encouraging us to re-engage with them, even to re-love them.

Pavilion, her show at Timothy Taylor’s Mayfair gallery, presents 16 new pieces, most of them arranged on a ceiling-high modular, wooden structure that references the work of Bauhaus director Walter Gropius and later modernists architects, whose buildings inspire her work.

Born in Oxford in 1972, Williams studied fine art at Glasgow School of Art and got a postgraduate diploma at the Royal Academy in London, in 2003. Her first solo show had been in London in 2001 and a succession of others quickly followed in 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2010 at McKee Gallery, New York. In 2007, Beneath a Woollen Sky, featuring a series of  mixed media images of modernist buildings, some of which sat below blue tapestry skies in which white clouds blossomed, was her first solo show at Timothy Taylor. Her work has appeared in numerous group shows, most recently in Building Blocks: Contemporary Works from the Collection, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, and in Point of Entry: The Space Between Art and Architecture, Galerie Pfriem, Lacoste, France.

She works in shallow bas-relief. In the early days, when her pieces were spare and mostly monochromatic with occasional primary and secondary colours added, calling to mind Ed Ruscha’s architecturally-inspired images from the 1960s. As she developed, becoming more confident, more daring in the subject matter she was prepared to tackle, the colour gamut broadened, the textures and techniques becoming more involved. These days, her panoply of materials includes Plexiglas, bubble wrap, balsa wood, cork, pebbles, wool, mortar, piano wire and coloured paper, but might insert sections of embroidery, too, sometimes calling on friends to help out with larger areas.

Some of the buildings she has depicted no longer exist but, in any case, she prefers not to visit the sources of her inspiration: ‘I quite like it that I’m offering my own version of what the place is like. I don’t need a 360-degree view to be able to re-create it,’ she has been quoted as saying, ‘Often, visiting a building only gets in the way.’ Instead, she scours the library of London’s Royal Institute of British Architects for period photographs to use as reference.

At Timothy Taylor, an almost 3m wide collage depicting Jean Dubuissonʼs early 1960s, apartment complex in Paris’s Maine-Montparnasse area – dubbed an example of brutalism – for which Williams hand-cut thousands of coloured paper fragments, is the centre-piece. Aside from this, the other items in the exhibition are relatively small in scale and, had it not been for the clever device of the wood structure that achieves the effect of amplifying and extending them, may well have been lost in the cavernous gallery void.

No figures appear in any of the works. In Seagram Building, 2012, the façade is reduced to an almost abstract orange and grey grid, interrupted by the precisely cut wooden slatted blinds and assiduously realized plants in the empty offices within. City Hall, 2011, is little more than the dark zig-zagging shape of a staircase in profile overlaid on a geometrically patterned, lime, dark green and yellow, tessellated wall surface. The colours may sound loud but are never lurid, more often sudued. Elsewhere the subject matter originates from architects and designers who created their own softened versions of modernism, including Eric Lyonsʼ 1950s very humanly-scaled Parkleys, part of the Span housing scheme at Ham Common in London. Subtle and elegant, the star of the show is Williams’ rendering of the Sonneveld House – a family home – minus the family – built by architects Brinkman and Van der Vlugt in 1933, in Rotterdam, which she overlays with the finely-cut, filigreed silhouette of a tree.

Soulful and reinvigorating they may be, but despite the home-spin techniques and the rendering in warm colours that restores the structures she chooses to their unblemished origins, Williams’ finished pieces are not overly prettified, nor steeped in nostalgia. They flirt with the viewer but instead of cosying up and allowing us to get too close, each maintains an ambiguous, impenetrable distance, and its this quality that makes them special and is, ultimately, their USP. Within a few days of opening, the exhibition was almost completely sold out.

Images from top
City Hall, 2011
Mixed Media

The artist, Lucy Williams
Photographed by Adam Shapland

Seagram Building, 2012
Mixed media

The display structure
Todd White Art Photography, London


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The publishers of The Blog insist that all images supplied for publication in our posts are cleared for that use before being sent to us. Whether pictures are sent to us as email attachments or made available as downloadable files, any responsibility for fees which may, under any circumstances, fall due, must be borne by the source supplier

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Poster Design | The Magic of Things

Friday, August 17th, 2012

The Magic of Things
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
Zürich, Switzerland
29th August, 2012 – 6th January, 2013

Accounts vary but one version of the story is that, in the year 1900, when Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec were at work in Paris, Picasso was entering his Blue Period and Edvard Munch was painting The Girls on the Bridge, Emil Kahn (1883–1972), just seventeen years old – an autodidact who never went to art school – had an argument with his parents, left his family home in Stuttgart and moved to Berlin. He bummed around doing odd jobs and on a whim entered a poster competition organised by the Priester Match Company. He won first prize. His son Karl explained later that Kahn, who changed his name to Lucian Bernhard, believed that the actual facts of his youth had little relevance to his adult work and that he enjoyed toying with the details of his life, revising his stories to suit a particular audience. What is certain and unambiguous is that, at a time when posters were dominated by flowery Art Nouveau and Jugenstil decoration, Bernhard’s bold, stripped down, elegant design signalled the beginning of the modern commercial poster and marked the start of his legendary career.

So precious is their collection of vintage posters – it was started in 1875 – that it can only be viewed by prior appointment, however, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Switzerland’s leading design and visual communication museum, has delved into its phenomenal archive – roughly 350,000 posters, one of the most comprehensive and important of its kind in the world – and put together The Magic of Things, a celebration of product posters.

Lucien Bernhard, whose work figures prominently in the exhibition had recognised how effective advertising that used a compact blend of product and brand name could be. In a world of unprecedented, booming economies, as yet untouched by the harsh realities of the First World War, his posters pioneered selling to a burgeoning consumer society. During the next two decades he became well-known throughout Europe.

Understandably, in the inter-war period when only the well-off had the means to buy, product posters were aimed predominately at the middle and upper classes. In the 1940s Switzerland experienced a rapid economic upswing which resulted in the dawning of a golden age of the Swiss product poster. Now, with improved printing techniques, Swiss designers – among them, Niklaus Stoecklin, Peter Birkhäuser, Donald Brun and Otto Baumberger – building on Bernhard’s flat style, introduced mood lighting and highlights to lend beguiling sensuality, as well as tactile qualities to illustrations of objects as unglamorous as household cleaning fluid to spark plugs. By introducing additional complementary items – props – the brand name products were made to emanate a seductive emotional draw. Perfect for a country with four national languages – which may have been the underlying reason for the object poster’s prolonged success in Switzerland – copy was practically non-existent. Stoecklin’s posters in particular, included no other copy than that which appeared on the products themselves. The Bauhaus and all the various early modern movements had happened, however, the style of these Swiss poster artists, who absorbed some influences from Art Deco and surrealism, was in essence a continuation of an earlier one and represents a period before strict grids and the Helvetica font become synonymous with Swiss design. More radical and rationalist, his early poster work was entirely different to Bernhard’s, the latter’s influence remains evident in the employment of reduced resources to maximum effect in the output of Josef Müller-Brockmann, whose international reputation would eclipse all those above.

With the democratisation of consumption in the 1960s, the emergence of global products and brands and the general growth of wealth in the western world leading to far greater competition, changes in advertising strategy became necessary. The focus on the product and its brand name no longer sufficed.

Eighty product posters have been selected for the exhibition and will be juxtaposed against photographs of objects, which, in the way they concentrate on the essential aspects of things, accentuate qualities similar to those the poster images project.

Posters from top
Eric de Coulon, Revue, 1941
Museum für Gestaltung Zurich
© The Artist

Lucian Bernhard, Galoschen – die besten Begleiter auf der Welt, 1913
Museum für Gestaltung Zurich, Plakatsammlung
© The Artist

Nicklaus Stoecklin, Sonnenschutz Bi-Oro, 1941
Museum für Gestaltung Zurich, Plakatsammlung
© The Artist

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Design | Century of the Child

Friday, July 27th, 2012

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000
Museum of Modern Art, NYC, USA
29th July – 5th November, 2012

Century of the Child is a large-scale overview of the modernist preoccupation with children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking. The rather grown up headings for the seven sections into which MoMA’s new exhibition is divided: New Century, New Child, New Art; Avant-garde Playtime; Light, Air, Health; Children and the Body Politic; Power Play; Designing Better Worlds, are clues to the organisers’ ambitious attempt to examine and make sense of the complex and often contradictory ideas about the place of children in the modern era and the role that 20th century designers, architects and artists have played – and that others over the course of the 21st century might play – in relation to it.
As early as 1900, Swedish design reformer and social theorist Ellen Key published Century of the Child, a manifesto for change – social, political, aesthetic, and psychological – that presented the universal rights and well-being of children as the defining mission of the century to come. The exhibition examines individual and collective visions for the material world of children, from utopian dreams for the citizens of the future to the dark realities of political conflict and exploitation. In this period children have been central to the concerns, ambitions, and activities of modern architects and designers, and working specifically for children has often provided unique freedom and creativity to the avant-garde.

On show are a range of over 500 items – 2D and 3D, large and small – including examples of toys, games, animation, clothing, safety equipment and therapeutic products, nurseries, furniture, books, playgrounds and school architecture.

Among the early featured items are Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s Bauhaus nursery furniture, puppets by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. There’s a high chair by Gerrit Rietveld; a glass, child-sized desk designed by Gio Ponti in 1930 and children’s chairs by Marcel Breuer and Alvar Aalto. Brightly coloured wooden teaching materials commissioned by Maria Montessori in the 1920s are also included. El Lissitzky’s Tale of 2 Squares and Roald Dahl’s The Gremlins 1943 – his first children’s book written for Walt Disney Productions appear, as well as Aleksandr Rodchenko’s poignant photograph, Pioneer Girl 1930.

Examples from the immediate post World War II, baby boom, years illustrate a new focus on less formal school environments and well-designed, safe and non-violent toys. In the aftermath of brutality and devastation, working closely with child psychologists, manufactures and educators, many designers sought to recover a lost innocence embodied in the spontaneity and directness of children’s art, and to emulate the constructive impulse of children’s play. Charles and Ray Eames in California, the influential CoBrA artists in Amsterdam – founded in 1948, who painted directly and spontaneously, like children, and worked expressively, without a preconceived plan – and the 1950s’ Independent Group in London, all epitomized this preoccupation with the child and of trying to look at the world from their perspective. In addition to works by these designers and artists, a school desk by Jean Prouvé is included as well as Lego building blocks, the helical spring toy Slinky and a selection of wooden toys by the Swedish company Brio.

The 1960s through to the end of the 20th century is a period in which children and consumer culture exerted power over each other. Through showing examples of Soviet Bloc space toys alongside Peter Ellenshaw’s 1954 plan of Disneyland, and plastic and inflatable toys by the Czechoslovakian designer Libuše Niklová, the exhibition considers the concept of the child as an autonomous consumer.

In the digital age children often surpass adults’ command of innovative design development in the realms of computer games and communication. In contemporary Japan, a deep fascination with youth is manifested by young girls shaping their identities through fashion, accessories, creative products, comic book and animated heroes. They process the images and text of material culture and mass media in their own ways, often naïvely but sometimes in active subversion of intended meanings and purposes.

Heralding a pronounced progressive or idealistic philosophy, the exhibition curators, in using examples of toys designed and handcrafted by children in a South African village; Jukka Veistola’s UNICEF poster from 1969; the XO laptop from the One Laptop per Child program; Marimekko clothing and do-it-yourself toys and Isamu Noguchi designs for play equipment and his – ridiculed at the time – Riverside Park Playground of 1933, attempt to communicate to us and children that children deserve a better world, and that through passionate public discourse among educators, parents, and politicians, and of course through good design, this world might indeed be possible to achieve.

Images from top
Werner John, Swiss, born 1941
Kinder Verkehrs Garten, Children’s traffic garden.
Poster advertising a children’s traffic school, 1959
Lithograph, 129.5 x 91.4 cm, 51 x 36″.
Printed by Allgemeine Gewerbeschule, Basel.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Architecture and Design Purchase Fund

Helen + Hard AS, Norwegian, established 1996,
Siv Helene Stangeland, Norwegian, born 1966,
Reinhard Kropf, Austrian, born 1967
Geopark, Stavanger, Norway, 2011
Photograph by Emile Ashley. Courtesy of the Architects

Omnibot 2000, remote-controlled robot, c 1985
61 x 38.1 x 35.6 cm, 24 x 15 x 14″.
Manufactured by Tomy (formerly Tomiyama),
Katsushika, Tokyo, Japan.
Space Age Museum/Kleeman Family Collection,
Litchfield, Connecticut, USA

Elizawieta Ignatowitsch, Russian, 1903-1983
The Fight for the Polytechnic Schools is the
Fight for the Five-Year Plan, and for a
Communist Education of the body politic, 1931
Letterpress, lithograph, 51.4 x 71.8 cm, 20 1/4 x 28 1/4″.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Miss Jessie Rosenfeld

Ladislav Sutnar, American, born Bohemia,
now Czech Republic, 1897-1976
Build the Town building blocks, 1940-43
Painted wood, thirty pieces of various dimensions,
largest smokestack: 18.7 x 5.1 cm, 7 3/8 x 2″.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Ctislav Sutnar and Radoslav Sutnar

Gerrit Rietveld, Dutch, 1888-1964
Child’s wheelbarrow, 1923
Manufactured 1958.
Painted wood, 31.8 x 28.9 x 85.1 cm,
12 1/2 x 11 3/8 x 33 1/2″.
Manufactured by Gerard van de Groenekan.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.
© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / Beeldrecht, Amsterdam

Jukka Veistola, Finnish, born 1946
UNICEF poster, 1969
Offset lithograph, 100.3 x 69.9 cm, 39 1/2 x 27 1/2″.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of the designer

Jean Prouvé, French, 1901-1984
School desk, 1946
Enameled steel and oak,
72.4 x 114.3 x 86.4 cm, 28 1/2 x 45 x 34″.
Manufactured by Ateliers Jean Prouvé, Nancy
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dorothy Cullman Purchase Fund

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Sale + Exhibition | Klimt: Impressionist & Modern?

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale
Exhibition: Sotheby’s, London, UK. 2nd – 8th February, 2012
Sale: Sotheby’s, London, UK. 8th & 9th February, 2012

It’s often argued that modernism began some time in the 1860s and ended in the 1970s, roughly spanning the period from the beginning of Monet’s painting career to Picasso’s death, and therefore including impressionism and cubism and a long and very diverse list of other ‘isms. Living and working within the prescribed time scale but not usually considered to fit comfortably into any particular ‘ism, it’s interesting that Sotheby’s should include a painting by Gustav Klimt in this sale of impressionist and modern works.

The first paintings recognised as impressionist were produced in the 1870s. Claude Monet was already 22 years old when Klimt (1862-1918) was born and, dying in 1926, outlived him. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso gave birth to cubism in 1907, initiating the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 had said artists should treat nature ‘in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.’ Picasso, born in 1881, 19 years Klimt’s junior, had an extraordinarily-long and prolific working life that finally ended in his ninety-second year, 1973.

Starting out as classically-trained artist with tremendous draughtsmanship skills, Klimt eschewed the formulaic work that was acceptable in Vienna and threw all he had into symbolism often with quite shocking results that rocked the establishment. But the landscape paintings he produced on his regular summer retreats in the latter part of his working life, harped back to earlier 19th century Viennese and Central European picturesque art that aimed to capture and glorify nature – then, only recently discovered by middle and upper class townspeople, jaded by their everyday, urban lives, seeking some form of escape – largely due to the invention and proliferation of the railways, and by the access to the countryside this new mode of transport afforded. In the latter decades of the century, however, the goal of Austrian painters like Emil Jakob Schindler and Eugen Jettel was to evoke the atmosphere of the rural world, often through paintings of otherwise banal countryside scenes, subject to adverse weather and light conditions. No-one could argue that Farmhouse with Birch Trees (Lakeshore with Birches) below, the painting coming up for auction at Sotheby’s is the most exciting of Klimt’s landscapes but it is a good example of his own obsession with nature and his absorption and blending of the many influences he gathered up and played around with.

For his portraits, Klimt drew heavily on his study of the same Japanese prints the impressionists had looked at before him; in his less familiar landscape work, he sketched and painted directly from nature and experimented with the brush techniques that the impressionists had invented, but very often finished the paintings in his studio. As in the portraits, the composition and framing of his landscape paintings was influenced by the typical cropping seen in early scenic photography. In many, the foreground is little more than a very prominent textured surface, as in Attersee 1, 1900, with landscape details and a thin sliver of sky squashed up at the top of the canvas; typical of the effect of looking at a scene through a wide-angle lens. There is evidence that Klimt used a telescope to flatten his townscapes, the buildings in which however, remained true rather than abstracted as in cubist treatments of similar subject matter. He looked closely at Van Gogh’s outlining and colouring; Klimt’s Avenue in Schloss Kammer Park, 1912, could easily be taken for a Van Gogh. He studied Seuerat’s pointilist system, adapting it to create depth in paintings that were essentially two-dimensional so that each remained one of what Renaissence polymath Leon Battista Alberti christened ‘Windows through which we look out into a section of the visible world.’

Ever curious, Klimt was an avid experimenter, but I think it’s safe to say that he was neither a cubist nor an impressionist.

Klimt certainly consorted with individuals who, evidently, had modern ideas; Otto Koloman Wagner (1841-1918) – Austrian architect and urban planner – among other contemporary mainland Europeans, is said to have become a proponent of Architectural Realism, and, mitigating the reliance on historical forms in the Jugenstil – an Austrian version of Art Nouveau – buildings he began to design in the 1890s, opened the door for what became modern architecture. And if I seem to be going off at a tangent: Wagner was one of the group of Austrian artists, sculptors and architects who resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists, the Künstlerhaus – similar to the Paris Salon – along with Klimt, Joseph Hoffmann, Koloman Moser and Joseph Maria Olbrich, nineteen in all, to form the Vienna Secession in 1897, asserting their right to be able to create what they wanted to create rather than having to adhere to strict, official guidelines. Gustav Klimt was the group’s first president. Interestingly, Moravian-born, Austrian architect Adolf Loos, who objected to the amount of surface decoration on Jugenstil buildings, didn’t join. Klimt’s poster for the First Exhibition of the Society of Pictorial Artists in Austria – the Secession, in 1898 in which he chose a classical Greek theme – Theseus about to liberate the youth of Athens from the tyranny of the Minotaur – is a tense stark, asymmetric, linear composition in black, red and gold on a yellow ground, strongly reminiscent of the painting style Mondrian was to adopt some 20 years later. In 1903 Hoffmann and Moser left to found the Wiener Werkstätte, a fine-arts society with the goal of reforming the applied arts that could be described as being a prelude to Germany’s seminal Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919.

But, was Klimt’s painting ‘modern’? His roots firmly in the 19th century, could he have ever felt at ease in the 20th. Had he lived longer and had more of his work survived – many paintings were confiscated from their Austrian Jewish owners and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938, while a great number of other works had been moved in 1943 to the ’safety’ of Schloß Immendorf in lower Austria, only to be destroyed when retreating SS troops set fire to the castle to prevent it falling into enemy hands – the problem of classification might have been somewhat simpler. I don’t know and it’s possible that Sotheby’s aren’t sure either.

Paintings from top:
Pablo Picasso, Buste d’homme, 1969
Private collection
£500,000-700,000

Claude Monet, Berges de la Seine près de Vétheuil, 1881
Private collection
Estimate £800,000-1,200,000

Gustav Klimt, Seeufer mit Birken (Lakeshore with birches), 1901
Private European collection
Estimate £6,000,000-8,000,000

Middle, top: Gustav Klimt, c.1909. Detail of original photograph by Pauline Hamilton.
Taken from Gustav Klimt, Landscapes. Edited by Stephen Koja. Published by Prestel, 2006

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Sculpture & Design | Harry Bertoia, Sculptor

Friday, December 9th, 2011


Forthcoming auctions of Harry Bertoia sculptures in the USA
Important Design Wright, Chicago. December 15th, 2011
Important 20th Century Design Sotheby’s, New York. December 15th, 2011
20th Century Decorative Arts Bonhams, New York,December 14th, 2011

My idea for this post – having noticed that many originals were coming up for sale in a series of auctions, all in the US – was to do something on collectable modern chairs. By chance, however, researching, I happened across Harry Bertoia’s sculpture work. His Diamond Chair furniture series are beautiful and ubiquitous, sculptural objects – somewhat easier on the eye than on the seat of the pants – but I have to admit it came as news to me that Bertoia was a sculptor and, more than that, a musician of sorts. It turns out that, initially, the chair design provided the cash that allowed the designer to develop his sculpture work; the artist discovered a way of making music with the sculptural objects, which are now being bought and sold for many thousands of dollars.

Born in Italy in 1915, aged fifteen Harry Bertoia emigrated with his parents to Canada, then to Michigan, USA. He went to college in Detroit and later to the Cranbrook Academy of Art founded by Finnish immigrant, Eliel Saarinen – father of Eero Saarinen – and intended as an American equivalent to the Bauhaus, in Michigan. Charles Eames had been a contemporary of Eero at Cranbrook, as had Ray Eames (then Ray Kaiser). Afterwards, Bertoia worked briefly with the Eames duo in California on designs for bentwood furniture. At Cranbrook Academy, he had also made the acquaintance of Florence and Hans Knoll and after working as a furniture designer throughout the 1940s, setting up his own business in 1950, he began work on his first chair for the Knoll company: the Model 420 Diamond. The now familiar design of chromium-plated steel was an instant best-seller; the royalty payments were huge; it and it’s variants remain marketed and produced by Knoll. Freed from the restrictions of having to earn a living by design, Bertoia now devoted himself exclusively to the sculpture work he had begun in the late 40s.

Produced during the 60s and starting out as an exploration of natural forms, the highly complex and labour intensive Bush Sculpture series resemble eccentric bonsai trees and are executed in wire or brass-coated iron that over time took on a green patina.

Watching and listening to Harry Bertoia – who died in 1978 – playing his sound sculptures on this You-Tube video, he looks totally relaxed, in his element, enthralled, strolling, never rushing, from one piece to the next – a one-man Balinese gamelan orchestra – gently stroking the metal rods of a tall piece, setting them in motion, striking what might be a table-sized gong then clashing the steel lozenges of another standing piece so as to combine the various sounds produced to create a minimal, ambient sort of unstructured music. A series of vinyl albums, Sonambient, were recorded, produced and released by the artist himself, who also designed their minimal packaging. In the late 1990s, Bertoia’s son, Val, rootling around in the barns in Pennsylvania that were used as studio space, discovered a large collection of unopened, album sets, which he sold for large sums. Some of the music was re-issued by a Japanese company and can be found at Discogs.

Images, from top
Untitled, Gong, 1965
Hand-hammered copper with applied patina
Estimate $200,000–300,000
Courtesy of Wright

Untitled, circa 1950
Steel
Estimate $60/80,000
Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Untitled, circa 1943
Copper and partially-painted steel
Estimate $50/70,000
Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Untitled, circa 1960
Welded copper and patinated bronze
Estimate $50/70,000
Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Welded Wire Sculpture, circa 1955
Estimate US$5,000 – 7,000
Property from the Dorothy
& Marshall M Reisman Foundation
Courtesy of Bonhams

Bertoia Group, Courtesy of Wright

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Photography | André Kertész: A Given Moment

Friday, July 1st, 2011

André Kertész – Photographs
Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany. Until 11th September 2011

In the caption to the first image by André Kertész in Bruce Bernard’s marvellous and indispensable, great slab-of-a-book, Century (Phaidon, 1999), in typical understatement, the author describes Kertész as: ‘…an Austrian soldier destined to become a great photographer’.

Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau in collaboration with Jeu de Paume in Paris is showing a retrospective of over 300 photographs by Kertész, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, whose early photojournalist work impacted on that of others, including writer and photographer, Brassï and Henri Cartier-Bresson, both also destined to merit the description great photographer.

Bernard goes on to tell us that André Kertész first acquired a camera in 1913 – he was eighteen years old – just prior to his drafting into the Austro-Hungarian army. Whilst on active service he was wounded and paralysed for a whole year but still managed to produce his first serious works – photographs of soldiers on the Eastern front. A few prints remain, however, the negatives of all the photographer’s early work were, unfortunately, destroyed in 1918.

Born in Hungary, to jewish middle-class parents, Andor Kertész (later André) lived in Budapest working at the stock exchange before, after the war, moving to Paris where he joined fellow emigrés, László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa and Brassaï.

“I interpret my feeling at a given moment. Not what I see, but what I feel,” Kertész once said, seeing photography as an instrument for describing contemporary life. In Paris, to make ends meet, he produced reportage photography for the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and The Times (London) and made contact with the avant garde artists of Montparnasse: Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder and Brancusi, among others. He also met and discovered he had much in common with the Surrealism group led by André Breton that included the American photographer and artist, Man Ray. He had taken the famous photograph Underwater Swimmer while recuperating in 1917; the optically distorted body beneath light reflections on the surface of the water would appear to anticipate his later works – and of some of the surrealists – and it wasn’t until some 10 years later the aesthetic effects of reflection were to become popular at the Bauhaus. In 1933 Kertész went on to produce the series entitled Distortions, in which female figures, distorted by mirrors, lead a life of their own between caricature and eroticism.

Despite the often complex nature of the thinking that the photographer put into them, like the best photojournalism, Kertész’s images are always simple, uncompromisingly direct and carefully cropped to include only those elements the eye demands. One of my particular favourites, which is included in the Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition is the Magritte-like Martinique, shot on New Year’s Day, 1972. The image is rich, yet so reduced that it appears almost flat, almost but not quite devoid of perspective and with the very minimal shape of the upper torso of a man, who we know instinctively is alone on the other side of the translucent, frosted glass screen that separates the balconies of this hotel near the water’s edge. I love Washington Square, too, for similar reasons: again, the simplicity, the reduction of the features of the park scene in deepest winter to almost but not quite pure black and pure white. As a photographer specialising mostly in garden and plant photography, myself – click here to access my website – I’m drawn towards Melancholic Tulip, an earlier work produced during the year that WWII began in Europe. It’s not difficult to imagine the uneasiness of Kertész, who moved to New York City only three years before.

In New York City where, struggling to make ends meet he accepted a post on House & Garden. Later, Kertész began working for the fashion magazine Look and for Harper’s Bazaar , with legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, who was previously with VU in Paris, one of the French publications, including Art et Médecine, Paris Magazine and UHU that the photographer had contributed to. In 1942, accepting an offer to work exclusively for Condé Nast, he remained with the company until 1963. That year, on a trip to Paris Kertész discovered a large number of his old negatives that fired his enthusiasm to begin experimenting again, bringing him much wider recognition and international recognition. His work has appeared in numerous books and in exhibitions around the world.

André Kertész, most certainly a great photographer, was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government in 1983 and died on 28th September 1985, leaving an archive of 100,000 negatives.

Images above from top:
Melancholic Tulip New York, 1939
Gelatin silver print. Printed c. 1980. Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Martinique January 1st 1972
Gelatin silver print. Vintage print. Courtesy Attila Pocze, Vintage Galéria, Budapest, Hungary

Washington Square January 9th, 1954
Gelatin silver print. Vintage print. Collection of Leslie, Judith and Gabrielle Schreyer

Also showing
Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century,
Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Munkácsi
Royal Academy, London, UK. Until 2nd October 2011

Are you familiar with Kertész’s work?
What do you see as its merits?

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Design | 21st Century Boys

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Barber Osgerby
Industrial design studio

I obviously haven’t been paying attention. Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby’s eponymously-named design company has been around for quite a while but I must admit to not having heard of it until I shot some portraits – as a predominantly garden and plant photographer, a departure for me – of architects, Adam and Irenie Cossey and their children to go with those I’d already done of the interiors – another new departure – of their beautiful home in London’s Islington. Two of the Cossey kids, love the Barber Osgerby-designed Home dining table almost as much as their parents, see below.

Irenie Cossey, who trained as an architect had been involved – via the specialist retail interior design practice Universal Design Studio on aspects of the new Mulberry flagship store in London’s Bond Street – with Barber Osgerby and had several items of their furniture, including the elegant, Corian-topped dining table for Isokon Plus. I came across the duo again quite recently when I discovered that their polypropylene Tip Ton chair for Vitra, above, was a big hit at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair.

I’m writing this and have done some retrospective research as much for my own education as that of any of The Blog’s followers so, if you already know all of this stuff, just skip the next paragraph….

Looking at the list of their achievements on their simple but well-designed website, I can’t believe Barber Osgerby escaped my attention for so long. They founded their partnership as long ago as 1996 after studying architecture at the Royal College of Art, London, of which I’m also an Alumni. Isokon Plus produced their Loop chair the following year and their Flight stool in 1998. Features on them and their work began appearing in 2002 in The Observer and Telegraph magazines and in the FT. They were awarded a major arts prize in 2004 that led to a commission to design new pieces for the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea and more magazine appearances: Sunday Times Style, Arena, Blueprint. Maybe I missed those issues. Over the next few years, features on them appeared in a diverse number of UK and international magazines, including: GQ Style, I.D., The New York Times, Abitare, House & Garden, Vogue, but I somehow still didn’t get wind of them. These were followed by more coverage in the stylish Numéro and Wallpaper* magazines, Esquire and The World of Interiors. The list goes on…as does the list of clients they have produced collections for: Cappellini, Magis, Vitra, Venini, Swarovski, Flos and Established & Sons, among others; they have also collaborated with Sony. Examples of Barber Osgerby’s work form part of the permanent collections of the V&A Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Design Museum, London; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. What’s weird is that many times, on my way to the RIBA bookshop in London to flick through the latest magazines, I’ve walked past and admired the bespoke, futuristic reception desk that they designed in 2008.

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful – Dieter Rams

When Marcel Breur put the curves into Bauhaus furniture, whether he admitted it or not, he wasn’t sticking entirely to the accepted wisdom handed down via Adolph Loos, who got it and adapted it from its original source the American architect, Louis Sullivan, responsible for establishing the shape of the tall steel-framed skyscraper in Chicago, that ‘form follows function’. Breur was aware that beauty, albeit a 20th Century, stripped-down version of the notion was also an essential ingredient of design. What instantly appeals to me about Barber Osgerby’s work is that, just as great designers like Dieter Rams, Achille Castiglione and Vico Magistretti followed this same modernist ‘tradition’, each interpreting it to their very personal aesthetic, similarly the design duo are doing the same in our 21st Century. Their bold use of black and white juxtaposed against primary and secondary colours probably derives – perhaps subconsciously – from the Bauhaus via Richard Rodgers hi-tech architecture. On a more extreme level, in terms of colour, parallels can be drawn between its use in their product and the way that Donald Judd’s brightly coloured box sculptures set against his own bare sheet metal works and the severity of Carl Andre’s ‘no compromise’ minimalism made the genre approachable, opening the door for Jonathan Ive’s groundbreaking, minimalism minus the chill factor, approach at Apple.

Tip Ton, pictured above, durable, stackable, requires zero maintenance and can be used in any environment. The chair is light and made from low cost recyclable plastic; inexpensive to produce it should be available at an economical price. As well as the resting position of a normal chair, it tilts forward 9 degrees on the sledge-like ‘floor skid’ bases that connect the front legs to those at the rear. This type of position adjustment was previously only available on the more expensive office chairs with mechanical systems that allow the seat to move forward. The action is designed to straighten the pelvis and spine and improve the body’s blood flow. It looks pretty good, too.

Needless to say, I’ve only just discovered that Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby are designing the Olympic Torch for the London 2012 Games. What’s more, a monograph of the studio’s work will be published by Rizzoli and launched next month in New York at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair.

You can view my images of the Cossey house interiors at Arcaid Images

What do you think of Barber Osgerby’s design work?

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