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| Antiques |
Italian Renaissance
Marisa Bartolucci
07/01/2004
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Iconic Iconoclast
Credit for this renewed interest in Ponti’s work goes in
part to Brian Kish, a New York dealer in modern Italian design, who organized
Gio Ponti: A Metaphysical World, the first retrospective of the designer’s work,
at New York’s Queens Museum of Art in 2001. A year later, London’s Design Museum
held a retrospective of its own. Both shows revealed to a new audience not just
Ponti’s creative brilliance, but his protean nature. He was at turns a
classicist, a modernist and a post-modernist. Ponti altered his style according
to the medium, project and circumstance. While some see this as his genius, it
has also hurt his reputation. By defying easy definitions, Ponti’s work
challenges collectors and critics, who are more comfortable with easily labeled
designers.
 | | PONTI'S 1953 upholstered brass and walnut bench, $21,000. |
Unlike most early modernists, Ponti did not want to dispense with
the past. He believed a new design language could be formulated through the
synthesis of tradition and industrial logic. In his own work, he strove for a
design patois that was light, transparent and poetic. His 1957 Superleggera
chair serves as an icon for this ambition. An inspired work of rational
minimalism, light enough to lift with a finger, it is based on the rush-seated
wooden chairs made by craftsmen in the seaside town of Chiavari. Ponti called it
a “chair-chair” because, like a Platonic ideal, it had been reduced to its pure
essence. These design landmarks are still produced in volume and, thus, are
relatively inexpensive. Fred Silberman, a New York dealer, is selling a set of
eight original Leggera chairs from the early 1950s, out of which the
“superlight” version evolved, for a mere $12,500. The versions now being
manufactured by Cassina sell for $1,250 each.
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