A Brash, Bright Light of Modern Italian Design

Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, who died last week in Milan at age 90, spent his life provocatively challenging the status quo.

His lipstick-red Valentine portable typewriter for Olivetti in 1969 and the brightly hued and patterned laminate furniture he designed for the Memphis Group in the 1980s elevated Sottsass to the role of impresario of Italian style for decades. The sweep of his postmodernist irreverence was prodigious, from bookcases and pepper grinders to mainframe computers, corporate office chairs and Malibu beach houses.

"Every time he did something, the influence on the world of design was enormous," says Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art. MOMA's permanent collection includes 21 pieces by Sottsass, including a red, black and yellow telephone and a pink aluminum lamp.

The Memphis Group, which blasted onto the scene at the Milan furniture fair in 1981, was a handful of design's brightest talents from around the world. Rejecting the exhaustively explored shapes and staid colors of mid-century modern design, Sottsass encouraged the group's young designers and architects to upend established notions of furniture, fabrics, lighting, glass and ceramics. The heat of their genius became part of the history of popular culture. "If you didn't know that the 20th century had a soul, now you know," noted designer George Nelson wrote in 1983.

The daring Memphis originals had hefty price tags and were collected by such highbrow tastemakers as Karl Lagerfeld. But the squiggly shapes, iridescent prints and in-your-face colors of Memphis were soon knocked off as sheets or bath rugs. Memphis's influence was wide-ranging, and even interior designers on staff at Woodward & Lothrop's downtown store in 1984 created a model room around avant-garde Memphis tables and chairs.

But it is the Valentine that many in the design world return to again and again. The red machine in the plastic casing gave the typewriter a more human presence and, some say, was a precursor to the playful genius of Apple's original iMac computers. Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, calls the Valentine "the most iconic of modern Italian products." It is part of the Cooper-Hewitt's permanent collection, as well as that of many other international museums.

"Besides his enormous talent and perceptive nature, he was one of the most influential designers in the world and a true mentor," Antonelli says. "He taught people not really how to design but how to look at life so you can design better."