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  Aldo Tura / Italian Post-War Coffee table with furled edges c. 1950

  ALDO TURA  Italy

  Coffee table  with furled edges c. 1950

  Vellum-covered birch with mahogany lacquered cherry legs

  Illustrated: Mid-Century Modern, Furniture of the 1950s, Cara Greenberg
  (New York: Harmony Books, 1984) p. 160.

  H: 18 1/2” x D: 21”  x  37”

  Price: $14,500

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  Alberto Marconetti / Italian Post-War Design Armchairs c. 1960’s

  ALBERTO MARCONETTI  Milan, Italy (active Argentina)

  Armchairs (Two available) c. 1960’s

  Oak, painted iron, leather strapwork and seat

  Marks:  by Alberto Marconetti  (script signature)

  H: 40 1/2”  x  W:  27”  x D: 21”
  Seat height: 19″

  Price: $7,450 (each)

  This pair of armchairs nods to the influence of such Italian designers as Carlo Bugatti and Carlo Mollino yet are their own unique creation.  They have an unusual anthropomorphic quality in that the frame suggests a skeletal structure.  In addition, the leather strapwork, iron loops and hooks allude to the equipage of the ancient Roman equestrian order.

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  Sori Yanagi / Tendo Co. Ltd. / Japanese Crafts “Butterfly” Stool c.1956

  Sori Yanagi (1915-2012), Japan
  Tendo Co. Ltd., Japan

  Butterfly stool, 1956.

  Bleached rosewood veneer on plywood with brass.

  H: 15” x W: 16 ½” x D: 12”

  Price: $4,900

  This model can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

  The Japanese designer Sori Yanagi is best known for his 1956 Butterfly Stool. It is both elegant and utterly simple: two curved pieces of molded plywood are held together through compression and tension by a single brass rod. The stool’s graceful shape recalls a butterfly’s wings, and has also been compared to the form of torii, the traditional Shinto shrine gates. He loved traditional Japanese crafts and was dedicated to the modernist principles of simplicity, practicality and tactility that are associated with Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, and Le Corbusier.”

  Yanagi, who studied architecture and art at Tokyo’s Academy of Fine Art, was inspired by the work of Le Corbusier and by the designer Charlotte Perriand, with whom he worked in the early 1940s, while she was in Tokyo as the arts and crafts adviser to the Japanese Board of Trade. But perhaps the most indelible influence on Yanagi was that of his father, Soetsu Yanagi, who led the “mingei” movement, which celebrated Japanese folk craft and the beauty of everyday objects, and who founded the Nihon Mingeikan (or Japanese Folk Crafts Museum) in Tokyo. Yanagi fils, who was named director of the museum in 1977, succinctly described his design aesthetic in a 2002 interview in The Japan Times: “I try to create things that we human beings feel are useful in our daily lives. During the process, beauty is born naturally.” Throughout his life, Sori Yanagi was inspired by what he called “anonymous design” — he cited the Jeep and a baseball glove as two examples — and he in turn inspired younger designers, like Naoto Fukasawa, Tom Dixon and Jasper Morrison.

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  Fernando and Humberto Campana, Zig Zag Screen 2001

  Humberto Campana (1953 – )  Brazil
  Fernando Campana (1961 – ) Brazil

  Zig Zag Screen, 2001

  Circular iron frame with electrostatic silver painted surface, translucent PVC hose stretched in a web pattern.

  Illustrated: Campanas, Humberto and Fernando Campana (Sao Paulo: Bookmark 2003) p. 240; Mood River, February 3 – June 26, 2002, exh. cat. Jeffrey Kipnis and Annetta Massie (Ohio: Wexner Center, 2002)

  H: 78” x D: 69”

  Price: $11,500