Alessandro Mendini (1931-2019) for Studio Alchimia 
'Poltrona di Proust' armchair, hand-painted...

Alessandro Mendini (1931-2019) for Studio Alchimia 

'Poltrona di Proust' armchair, hand-painted by Francesco Migliaccio, circa 1985-1988 
Painted fabric, painted wood 
108cm high, 102cm wide, 90cm deep 

Provenance 
Christie's, Monaco, 'Arts Décoratifs du XXème Siècle', 25th June 1989, lot 42 
Private Collection, London 

Literature 
Albrecht Bangert, 'Italian Furniture Design: Ideas Styles Movements', Munich, 1988, pp. 63, 65, 116 
Frans Haks, 'Atelier Mendini: Alessandro e Francesco Mendini: Progetti dal 1989 al 1996',  L'archivolto, 1998, p. 40 
Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, 'Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990', Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011, p. 41 

Footnote 
In 1976, Alessandro Mendini joined Studio Alchimia, a group of radical designers whose collective goal was to embrace an experimental framework of design, which strayed from the functional and industrial limitations of production which had dictated many of the previous movements of the twentieth century. That same year, Mendini’s conceptual design process for the Poltrona Di Proust commenced in collaboration with Francesco Binfaré. The goal was to question the nature of cost-efficient production and rationality in design, and to promote work which was instead unrestrained and personal.

Mendini encountered a copy of a chair in the Neo-Baroque style while researching the upper-middle-class environment associated with novelist and literary critic Marcel Proust, from whom the chair takes its name. Proust’s interest in the power of art as a vehicle for demonstrating subjective perception is embodied in the painterly technique of pointillist artist Paul Signac. The method of Signac, who employed densely applied polychromatic brushstrokes to build up painted scenes, is mimicked in this example by the hand of Franco Migliaccio. As a result, the ‘kitsch’ faux-antique bergère is re-designed and made new by Mendini’s approach, rejecting functionalist design through the synergy of a readymade form with a profusely hand-painted surface.

The piece was debuted as part of Mendini’s ‘Room of the Century’ in 1978 alongside the work of his Studio Alchimia contemporaries within the exhibition Incontri Ravvicinati di Architettura in Ferrara. Versions of Mendini’s Poltrona di Proust chair painted by Migliaccio, such as the present lot, are amongst the earliest examples of this important 1970s design. The armchair can be found in the Musée des Art Décoratifs, Paris, Vitra Design Museum, Weil-am-Rhein, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.