Norman Weinstein

Critic; Writer / United States /

www.archnewsnow.com

Norman Weinstein’s Notable Books of 2013

Nonfiction, Product/Industrial Design

title a–z

6 books

Carlo Scarpa: Venini, 1932–1947

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Marino Barovier

The author’s name and family authority should resonate with lovers of Venetian glass because the Baroviers have been in the Murano glass business since 1295 C.E., making it arguably the oldest company of family artisans ever. Marino Barovier has written with charm and impressive erudition about Venetian glass art in general, and Carlo Scarpa as glass designer in particular in his previously published, and sadly out-of-print Carlo Scarpa: Glass of an Architect. Scarpa’s glass-designing career centered on work at two Venetian companies, M.V.M. Cappelin and Venini. The newly published Carlo Scarpa: Venini 1932–1947 drops mention of Scarpa’s Cappelin oeuvre previously illuminated in Glass of an Architect, in favor of his more technically accomplished, more wildly colorful and dramatically patterned Venini glass works. The result? A keenly written and photographically masterful catalogue raisonné of nearly 300 of Scarpa’s most daring glass designs (the contents of the 2012 exhibition in Venice “Venetian Glass: Carlo Scarpa,” coming to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in abbreviated form in November 2013).

The book categorizes glass pieces by production techniques. Within every production technique category are examples of decorative glass (vases and plates) and non-decorative glass (candlesticks). This banquet of thumbnail and full-size photos of the pieces accompanied by exhibition-terse captions is prefaced by six interpretative essays by various historians and critics, and a poignant memoir by Carlo Scarpa’s son Tobias (who has had a long and successful glass-designing career since his father’s death.). If you suspect that the 2013 Met Scarpa exhibition hints at a richer story, this grand summary of how Scarpa brought the fiery spirit of freshly minted modernism to the ancient art of Venetian glass offers a passionately panoramic overview.

Eileen Gray: Objects and Furniture Design

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Introduction by Carmen Espegel

Sandra Dachs Editor

This compact and well-illustrated introduction to objects and furniture designed by Eileen Gray was published at a propitious time. The largest exhibition ever presented of Gray’s designs was presented by the Centre Pompidou, attracting widespread popular and critical attention at the beginning of 2013. If the catalogue associated with that extensive exhibition were more widely available outside of France, there might be no rationale for this well-informed, devout, but slim introductory survey. But despite that catalogue, and the half-dozen previously penned books on this elusive designer, there is always room for another text to shed light.

Consider Gray the Emily Dickinson of design: reclusive, simultaneously ancient, modern, and timeless, a relentless questioner of conventional aesthetic wisdom, and a loner beyond simple categorization. Even the title of this text can arouse controversy. Other books about Gray label her as “architect/designer,” although she lacked any formal architectural training, and only three of her architectural projects were completed during her lifetime. Yet arguably her best known work is E-1027 Villa, an influential modernist house Gray designed with the architectural critic Jean Badovici, soon to be re-opened on the southern French coast after a laborious restoration process. She was protean: initially creating original lacquered screens mingling Art Deco and Orientalism, inventing carpet designs suggesting cubist geometry, and designing scores of memorably off-beat lamps, mirrors, chairs and tables. One of her chairs invited two different manners of sitting. She aptly named it “Non-Conformist Chair.” Of the Transat Chair, unfortunately currently in storage at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the architect and furniture Amanda Levete spoke with great clarity when she noted that Gray’s chair is “like architecture in miniature. Because every piece of it is doing exactly what it should be doing.” The authors of this survey don’t wax as eloquently about Gray’s furniture as Levete, but their emphasis on Gray as a restless explorer of “every possible use that a piece of furniture could be put to” makes for a mesmerizing read.

Italian Liberty Style

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Irene De Guttry

Maria Paola Maino

Of books focused on Art Nouveau decorative arts there is no dearth, a fact perhaps connected to the burgeoning interest in biomorphic forms and patterns in our time. But Italian Liberty Style is the only book in English that critically reflects upon the peculiar Italian version of Art Nouveau, and that fact alone makes this well-illustrated but brief overview essential.

Arguably, Art Nouveau was a first foreshadowing of stylized decorative patterns emphasizing the sinuous and undulating lines and interlocking luxuriant flora and fauna displays now digitally reproduced from detailed nature photography. Putting this decorative design orientation within a specifically Italian context means that the forms and colors of decorative items (think furniture, pottery, and glass) were derived from Italy’s rural landscapes and urban food markets. Additionally—and this is a key point the authors pass over a bit breezily—Italian Liberty Style has roots in the manic profusion of energetic zigzagging details of nature in Baroque period art, and in other Italian Renaissance art influenced by North African Islamic arts, particularly calligraphy. So to dive into the 100 illustrations comprising this book’s core, you are immersing yourself in cross-cultural cross-talks charged with spicy Italian flavors.

The “Liberty” in the book’s title refers both to the Arthur Liberty’s department store—exploding with Art Nouveau decorative items for the homes of the emergent 19th-century middle class—and the spirit of “liberty,” a new political, social, and aesthetic freedom emerging after Italy’s 19th-century national unification. That explains why even the few imitative decorative works on display in these pages—those William-Morrising themselves into plant-rich but peat-dense wallpaper—still maintain charm. Giovanni’s glass panel of the mythic Medusa could have been created yesterday. And advertising posters exude an exotic romanticism easily confused with 21st-century waves of neo-psychedelic graphics marked with Botticellian flair.

Kamisaka Sekka

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Khanh Trinh Editor

John Szostak

Richard L. Wilson

This sensitively written and finely produced catalogue accompanying last year’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia of the work of the artist Kamisaka Sekka offers a visionary re-thinking of the classical Japanese style known as “Rinpa.” For Westerners unfamiliar with Rinpa, Richard Wilson’s introductory essay offers a concise overview of this style, which showcases the natural world suffused with poetic lyricism and which dominated both fine and applied Japanese arts from the 16th to the end of the 19th century.

This historical preface opens a pathway into the heart of the book: the 300 plus color illustrations of Sekka’s art accompanied by Trinh’s biographical and artistic account of how Sekka matured into a leading figure in the evolution of modern Japanese design. Essentially, Trinh presents Sekka as a liminal artist par excellence. A world traveler aware of the Western art world’s emergent fascination with Japanese aesthetics at the birth of the 20th century, Sekka possessed both the taste and sensibility needed to treat traditionally stylized Japanese nature imagery with a robust experimental spirit and a healthy dose of humorous irreverence. Sekka’s woodblock book of satiric designs from 1903 risked outright vulgarity (one dog sniffing the excrement of another) when not mocking sterile imitation of traditional motifs (a Japanese character becomes stylized into a menacing cartoonish devil).

In a serious vein, Sekka’s reformulation of landscape designs for silk kimonos approached the threshold of pure abstract patterns. He emboldened subdued colors from the floating world, the dreamy palette of Buddhist Weltschmerz, and injected a blazing chromatic force, the effect being akin to shouting uncontrollably during the conventional silence of Zen meditation. Even more surprising was Sekka’s willingness to appropriate Rinpa-like odes to nature’s bountiful flora by way of closely borrowing ideas from William Morris’s textiles.

By blurring distinctions between imaginative Japanese and Western biomorphic designs, and by mocking stale formulaic and clichéd Japanese folk art traditions while vibrantly revitalizing others, Sekka influenced Japanese designers in our time, including neo-Pop painter Ai Yamaguchi and fashion designer Akira Isogawa. Illustrations of their art conclude this eye-opening volume.

Moroccan Carpets and Modern Art

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Jürgen Adam

Florian Hufnagl Editor

Few interior furnishings have so caught the imagination of artists as carpets of Oriental pedigree. Artistic imagination makes carpets fly. From the ancient folktale Arabian Nights to the Disney film Aladdin in which an animated flying carpet has its own human personality, the carpet possesses a potent symbolic and aesthetic power. Ironic since carpets in our everyday lives can be so easily taken for granted, intended for the un-lofty fate of being trod upon, thoroughly grounded, often created by anonymous workers in high-tech factories in developing nations. Or we can consider faux-Eastern themed carpets as inexpensive domestic wall decoration, originally inspired by artisans in some Middle Eastern or Maghreb encampment, even if commercially and cheaply plentiful because of simplistic mass-produced copies of original folk styles. Or we can see exceptional folk carpets as art fit for major global exhibition, lifting them out of their usual utilitarian context. German architect and scholar Jürgen Adam has done just that—and what a gift he has given by putting them on exhibition in Munich at the International Design Museum.

Adam has collected an magnificent range of nomadic Moroccan folk carpets over the years that are significant artworks, and has noted strong crosscurrents between their designs and those of modern Western artists, including Eileen Gray, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. The International Design Museum’s exhibition offers a ravishing counterpoint of North African vernacular textile design and Euro-American modernism culled from Adam’s collection. If the carpets don’t seem to fly in tandem with Rothko’s canvases, you may have only your earthbound perception to blame.

For those unable to attend the Munich exhibition that opened in September 2013 and closes in May 2014, Adam, with the help of the International Design Museum, Munich, has created an exceptional exhibition catalogue, Moroccan Carpets and Modern Art. With over 700 gloriously printed color illustrations, this hefty oversized tome sports an embossed linen cover, and a consistently insightful commentary by Adam available in German, English, and French.

For anyone unfamiliar with the evolving folk tradition of Moroccan carpets, Adam offers a clear and comprehensive overview of their design features and history. Created traditionally in wool by various tribes of nomadic rug makers to serve as mats, blankets, or shawls, these pile, knotted, or flat-woven carpets share highly abstract and freely colored designs. Their creative uses of color and abstraction attracted Le Corbusier and brought these carpets to the attention of other Western designers in the early 20th century. The Moroccan rug-making tradition continues to undergo dramatic changes in the present, substituting industrial for natural dyes, and cotton (new and recycled clothing scraps) and synthetic fabrics for wool. but the inventive abstract patterns and subtle shimmering shadings prevail as their stylistic signature.

By juxtaposing these Moroccan carpets with Western art by Rothko, Newman, and others, Adam is doing considerably more than showing the pre-modern roots of Abstract Expressionism, valuable as that is as an exercise in neglected art history. In thoroughly analyzing the ties between Maghreb textile design and abstract Color Field art in the West, he is offering a challenge to all current Western designers to consider the following lessons to be learned or reconsidered:

• the play of gradually modulated, boldly colored abstract patterns conveys both spiritual and musical associations, simultaneously communicating the antiquity of modern style and the modernity of ancient folk style. The spiritual associations are realized in esoteric symbols found in Islamic and Jewish mysticism, and could be inspiringly appropriated in secular contexts.

• Free-form and geometric patterns exist engagingly in isolation on various planes that seem to “cross talk.” This resulted in the transformation of a practical textile integral to a nomadic lifestyle into a multi-layered visual “book” of pan-Islamic, folk-flavored cultural conversations over centuries.

• Moroccan carpet designs communicate material and spiritual energies in constant motion. Like a Kandinsky or Klee painting, these Moroccan carpets offer no final “resting place” or clear focal center among viewers in their ever-dancing patterns. This kinetic sense implicit in their designs might explain the globally prevalent archetype of the flying carpet since the carpets’ dynamic designs transcend a purely passive decorative and practical earthbound role in favor of a jumpy, visually busy, eye-catching, oscillating display.

• Unlike digitally created designs that factor out tactic sense during the design process, hand-crafted Moroccan carpets entail constant fingertip sensitivity on the part of their artisans to fabric textures including small irregularities. Colorful abstract patterns grow out of this tactile encounter with material itself in hand for their creators.

• Adam quotes art critic Gottfried Boehm: “Carpets thus expand our understanding of imagery in an unusual way. They are pictures to look at and touch; they subvert the distinction between visible painting, tactile sculpture, and built space…” Note how the carpet’s “subversive qualities” are in synchronization with current genre-blurring and cross-disciplinary mixes happening today in industrial design, fashion, and architecture.

Whether you head to Munich or to a bookstore stocking this catalogue to catch a glimpse of this fruitful collision of ancient Maghreb carpets and modern Western art, your inner eye will be opened to hitherto bypassed design possibilities. Or you may simply savor and meditate upon flights of imagination catalyzed by abstract textile patterns. Or ponder what artists sans formal arts training can continue to teach those formally schooled.

Shiro Kuramata

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Deyan Sudjic

To give equal billing to the book designer as well as author of this nonpareil two-volume monograph on the extraordinary Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata is understandable when you hold this set in your hands. The books are encased in an acrylic box, a reminder of the wondrous furniture and interior decorations Kuramata could derive from unsexy acrylic. But as with everything pertaining to Kuramata, there is more than meets the eye initially. Empty the acrylic box of its sturdily bound volumes, one largely history and analysis of the artist by the attuned design critic Deyan Sudjic, author of The Language of Things, the other a catalogue raisonné with around 600 of Kuramata’s designs). Hold the acrylic box so that its surfaces are exposed to a strong light source. The box becomes prismatic, creating a multi-hued light show you could also create by turning a beveled glass pane, bringing to mind all of the material differences as well as commonalities of glass and acrylic.

During Kuramata’s tragically short life and career (b. 1934 – d. 1991), he playfully yet fiercely worked designing objects, furniture, and interiors (the interiors, sadly, are all demolished now) that existed memorably in the interstices between ambiguously paradoxical material states and states of mind. Confounding the transparencies of acrylic and glass by creating bravura masterpieces like his “Glass Chair” and his acrylic “Miss Blanche” chair, he also intermingled sensations of weight and weightlessness in his chair fabricated from wire mesh and in his cabinets that seem to bend like reeds in a breeze. He also had an uncanny love, perhaps inspired by Joseph Cornell’s art boxes, of creating profuse and asymmetrically configured drawers for bureau-like furniture that resembled what storage units Alice might have discovered in Wonderland.

Mingling ancient and modern Japanese folk fantasy traditions with touches of European Minimalism, Kuramata created a totally beguiling range of objects and furniture with a light and mysterious touch. Deyan Sudjic and book designer Jonathan Hares deserve our gratitude for a monograph that re-animates the sense of wonder and mystery that suffused all Kuramata ever touched in his studio.