Pâte de verre bowl for Daum by Enzo Mari

Enzo Mari was an influential industrial designer and a beloved curmudgeon who revered Marxism. His vintage mid-century modern designs are simple, functional and poetic. Widely known Mari-designed objects include desk accessories, such as the Formosa perpetual wall calendar, vases, cocktail tables and chandeliers. 

Enzo Mari's work is embedded within the city of Milan, the Italian capital of all things design. In fact, the traffic bollards he devised are part of the city itself: Shaped like "panettone" cakes, they simultaneously direct traffic and provide seating for pedestrians.

In 1974, Mari published Autoprogettazione? (roughly translated as self-design), a Marx-inspired, anti-industrial, do-it-yourself handbook for the everyday person to use to build furniture without the assistance of a glitzy designer or knowledge of complex joinery. Mari’s intent with the publication was to remove the alienation of the creator and manufacturer from the end product by teaching anyone to develop a critical eye for production.

Artek relaunched kits based on the blueprints in the manual in an exhibition at Spazio Rossana Orlandi in 2010. The subsequent collectability of his work was reportedly irksome for Mari because he abhorred the industrial production for which he was becoming known.

Mari’s meager upbringing heavily influenced his politics, and even in childhood, he would come up with ingenious ways to support the family financially. As a designer, the desire to envision and build significant pieces was more important to Mari than devising new marketing and retail sales tactics. He optimistically believed objects could change the world. This view went against the rising consumer mania for every next trend that surfaced in the late 20th century. Not surprisingly, his ecological and economical stance led him to produce fewer objects.

Mari's philosophy did not stop people from desiring his creations, nor prevent other designers from wanting to collaborate with him. Following World War II, he worked for companies like Danese, Olivetti, Artemide, Driade and Alessi, who brought his prodigious designs to the public, and Mari’s work was widely celebrated. 

The Golden Compass, Italy's highest honor for industrial design, was awarded to Mari four times before he died from COVID in 2020, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art has a permanent collection of his objects on display.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of Enzo Mari decorative objects, folk art and serveware.

For collectors, Daum is a name in the first rank of the French makers of art glass, along with those of Émile Gallé and René Lalique. Led in its early decades by the brothers Auguste (1853–1909) and Antonin Daum (1864–1931), the company, based in the city of Nancy, established its reputation in the Art Nouveau period, and later successfully adopted the Art Deco style.

In 1878, lawyer Jean Daum took over the ownership of a glassworks as payment for a debt and installed his sons as proprietors. Initially, Daum made glass for everyday purposes such as windows, watches and tableware, but the success that Gallé enjoyed at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris — the international showcase for which the Eiffel Tower was built — inspired the Daum brothers to begin making art-glass pieces. They produced popular works of cameo glass, a decorative technique in which an outer layer of glass is acid-etched or carved off to reveal the layer below, but Daum became best known for vessels and sculptures in pâte de verre — a painstaking method in which finely ground colored glass is mixed with a binder, placed in a mold and then fired in a kiln. 

Though early Daum glass was never signed by individual artists, the firm employed some of the masters of the naturalistic, asymmetrical Art Nouveau style, including Jacques Grüber, Henri Bergé and Amalric Walter (whose first name is frequently misspelled). Daum also collaborated with furniture and metalware designer Louis Majorelle, who created wrought-iron and brass mounts for vases and table lamps. In the 1960s, Daum commissioned fine artists, most notably Salvador Dalí and sculptor César Baldaccini, to design glass pieces. As you see from the works offered on 1stDibs, Daum has been home to an astonishingly rich roster of creative spirits and is today a state-owned enterprise making pâte de verre figurines.