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Alasdhair Willis

Didier Krzentowski

Philip Wood

Star Power

Ron Arad Josef Albers Paul Klee Marc Newson Mies van der Rohe Ettore Sottsass Wharton Esherick Maarten Baas

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Memphis
What’s not to love about a design collective that got its name from a Bob Dylan song? Nothing—except the look of the pieces. Memphis was not about beauty, or even good taste, and the group’s work, more than anything that emerged from other design movements of the past century, arguably deserves to be regarded as art. It all began in December of 1980, when Ettore Sottsass, an eminence of Italian design, met in Milan with a group of 20-something designers to discuss a new line of furniture. Everyone in attendance at the meeting—where Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)” was played over and over—was exasperated by the staid state of contemporary design. Deciding to collaborate, the group agreed that the only rule was that there were no rules. The first Memphis show, the next year in Milan, was a sensation. Some of today’s best-known designers, such as Philippe Starck and Jasper Morrison, were shocked and inspired by what they saw: bursts of vivid color everywhere and piece after piece made of cheap fiberboard forms covered in goofily patterned plastic laminates and put together at odd angles. The overnight success of furnishings that were intended to outrage left Sottsass disenchanted. In 1985 he left the collective, which dissolved three years later.

Functional Art
In the ’80s, prompted in part by the success of Memphis but mainly out of frustration with the fine-art world’s indifference, avant-garde furniture makers declared themselves to be artists under the banner “functional art.” Their work was astonishingly various in both style and quality. Castle—who had moved on from organic wood to fiberglass and experiments with historicist forms—produced a hallucinatory series that included such pieces as a table decorated with hanging brass rings and supported by a forest of truncated cones. This period also saw the appearance of such provocateurs as the now-disbanded team of Garouste et Bonetti, with their neo-Baroque designs (pony-hide-covered tables, chair legs shaped like coral branches), and two of today’s most influential designers, Ron Arad and Tom Dixon. An art-school graduate and dropout, respectively, Arad and Dixon taught themselves welding and created furniture using parts culled from London junkyards. Many of their designs from this period have become classics. Arad got into limited editions early, and his work has an admirable track record as an investment. His 1989 Rolling Volume chair, produced in an edition of 20 with five artist’s proofs, originally cost about $25,000. The 19th issue recently fetched $77,000 at auction. "History's Limits" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.