Il Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini)

This is a fascinating piece. I took this photo in the Guggenheim (NY), and while there were many interesting pieces on display at the exhibit, this one stuck with me the most. It's from 1933, by Renato Giuseppe Bertelli, and it's a bust of Mussolini.

I think it was intended to represent Mussolini as some sort of omniscient god. And to represent Mussolini's passion for speed, for power and for machines. And it does all of these things.

But it also shows a spinning Mussolini. The opposite of those creepy sculptures with glass eyes that follow you around the room, this sculpture is always looking in some other direction.

I love Italy, and it's upsetting to think that they could end up on the wrong side of WWII, of all wars. To send innocent people off to concentration camps, to invade the islands of Greece... it was a nation confused, spinning out of control.

On top of it all, this sculpture really does look like Mussolini..

The Bugattis

When I mentioned Carlo Bugatti in a design meeting earlier this week, I was met with blank stares. This is usually the case, so I thought I'd post a little about the Bugatti family.

Most people are familiar with the Bugatti family, but only for their luxury car designs, which began with Ettore Bugatti (born 1881).

The Bugatti car company is still around, producing not-so-shabby rides.

But it's Ettore's father, Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940) that I care about here. He designed some of the wildest furniture I've ever seen.


His father Giovanni was a prominent Milanese interior designer, so I imagine Carlo grew up surrounded by exotic objects (hence the unique influence from asian and islamic art)


But what's really fascinating is how perfectly some of his work encompasses both the flowing organic forms and intricacy of Art Nouveau, and the radial forms and simple geometry of Art Deco. It's all there.

Most designers from this period fall into one camp or the other- their work is either Art Nouveau or it's Deco. Carlo marched to his own beat.

And anyways, I hate categorizing people's work, and you especially can't categorize Carlo. His stuff is out there. The interior I show below was for a design pavilion, and was intended to raise eyebrows, but still...

Carlo's other son Rembrandt (brother of Ettore the car designer) was a sculptor. Here's a few examples of his work:


Rembrandt committed suicide in 1916, at age 31. Carlo, who had been very active up to this point, pretty much stopped working after this. I mean, he stopped building furniture. He kept busy on other things I'm sure (fish gotta swim, designers with this kind of talent gotta design). I read that he moved in with Ettore's family and spent his time painting, but I've never seen any of his paintings. I'll keep an eye out for them... I'm sure they are amazing.

Karl Blossfeldt: Urformen der Kunst

When I was working as a designer in New York, a friend of mine introduced me to 'Urformen der Kunst'. It's a collection of photographs by Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), and it influenced me a great deal. Her copy was one of the original prints, which is beautiful and extremely rare, but you can order a paperback reproduction online for almost nothing- just do a search of Karl Blossfeldt on Amazon and you'll find several books for around $10 that contain the entire collection.


Flowers, stems, leaves, buds, tendrils, seed pods; all meticulously arranged to show the intricate, elegant structure of their natural forms. Whenever I was having trouble designing something, and I mean anything, I would take some time to flip through this book. And not for direct inspiration of forms, I might be designing something sleek and modern, without curves. It didn't matter; somehow looking at these always helped.


Maybe it's because looking through them makes me think about what it is that makes something beautiful. I mean, why do we find some forms to be more beautiful than others? When I'm teaching art, one of the most difficult things is trying to explain why certain photographs or drawings are more beautifully composed. There are rules for avoiding bad composition but frankly, composition and beauty in form are entirely subjective things, innately impossible to explain with rules or laws. What makes certain forms more pleasing to our eyes than others? How and why?


Somewhere in the evolution of mankind, we developed a strong sensitivity to form, to shapes, to curves, and to compositions of light and dark. And when I look through these photos, at the beauty of the natural forms, it seems almost obvious that our sensitivity to form, our desire for ornament, for art, came in the millions of years we were surrounded by nothing but nature. Then again, maybe not. I'm fairly certain that humans were around for a long time before art. But the beauty of these images seems so fundamental, so basic, that the root of our aesthetic sensitivities must have come from the forms of nature. It is usually at this point in my sloth-like thought process that I realize the title of collection is "Urformen der Kunst", which translates to "Origin of Art". Good to know that Karl and I agree on something.