Beschreibung:

Carlo Mollino Pair of chairs, designed for the conference room, Lattes Publishing House, Turin 1951 Ash plywood, Resinflex, tubular steel, brass. Each: 97.5 x 38 x 56.5 cm (38 3/8 x 14 7/8 x 22 1/4 in.) Produced by Apelli & Varesio, Italy. From the production of 12.
Provenance Mario Lattes, conference room, Lattes Publishing House, Turin Gifted by the above to an employee of the Lattes Publishing House, Turin Thence by descent Acquired from the above by the present owner Literature Anne Bony, Les années 50, Paris, 1982, p. 315 Galerie Denys Bosselet, Carlo Mollino 1905/1973, Premier Designer, Dernier Artisan des Années '50, Paris, 1984, n.p. Derek E. Ostergard, ed., Makhintosh to Mollino, Fifty Years of Design, exh. cat., Barry Friedman Ltd., New York, 1984, no. 60 Fulvio Ferrari Carlo Mollino Cronaca, Turin, 1985, p. 121, fig. 199 Giovanni Brino, Carlo Mollino Munich, 1987, p. 110 Rossella Colombari, Carlo Mollino Catalogo Del Mobili-Furniture Catalogue, Milan, 2005, p. 80, fig. 112 Giovanni Brino, Carlo Mollino Architecture as Autobiography, Milan, 2005, fig. 347 Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, The Furniture of Carlo Mollino New York, 2006, p. 172, figs. 322-23, p. 228 Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, eds., Carlo Mollino Arabesques, exh. cat., Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Milan, 2007, p. 91, fig. 128 for a technical drawing, p. 92, fig. 131 for an image Catalogue Essay The present chairs are registered in the library of the Museo Casa Mollino, Turin, as numbers CM 323-1 and CM 323-2. Phillips wishes to thank Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, Museo Casa Mollino, Turin, for their assistance with the cataloguing of the present lot. Chairs from the conference room of the Lattes Publishing House, Turin, 1951 by Fulvio Ferrari Among the few interiors Carlo Mollino conceived were projects for two brave editors: Vladi Orengo, who fearlessly published art books during the 1940s whilst Turin was being heavily bombed, and Mario Lattes, the director of Lattes Publishing House, which published books by Simone Weil and Theodor Adorno, among others. Mario Lattes was, among other things, a painter, and his friendship with Carlo Mollino was characterized by high intellectual exchange. In fact, Mollino contributed to the journal Galleria Arti e Lettere, founded by Lattes in 1953. When asked to design the interior of the new headquarters of the Lattes Publishing House, their reciprocal respect and understanding drove the architect to submit to his client some of his most creative designs, confident they would be able to reach consensus and find the necessary financial resources. In fact, Mollino chose avant-garde materials for the offices, such as Fibrosil, metallic modular units, and bent plywood – materials which were at the time complicated to work with and of high production value. The conference room, which was also used as an art exhibition room, featured at its center a spectacular table made of bent plywood, surrounded by twelve chairs which were also executed in this new material and upholstered with white Resinfex. It is interesting to note that while the other furnishings from the Lattes Publishing House were made of solid wood with simple structural frames, Mario Lattes’s own office furniture included refined armchairs in bent plywood with sculpted armrests, as well as a large Fibrosil bookcase with a red Resinfex lining. It is important to remember that Apelli & Varesio, the manufacturer of this furniture, only used materials of the highest quality and therefore had to produce it in-house, which involved extremely costly procedures and at times methods of domestic fabrication. The necessary heat to bend the pre-cut wood was transferred using sponges soaked in boiling water and a fat iron. The cut wood was then inserted into the mould designed for the particular component. More specifically, the production of the present lot required the use of two moulds/stamps, one for the lower frame and one for the support of the seat back, the manufacture of which also required great workforce and a long time. The chairs here examined are a perfect testimony to Mollino’s modus operandi which can be defined as pure engineering: they in fact present a structure which