Rare Brass Wall Light by Gio Ponti for Arredoluce

An architect, furniture and industrial designer and editor, Gio Ponti was arguably the most influential figure in 20th-century Italian modernism.

Ponti (1891–1979) designed thousands of furnishings and products — from cabinets, lamps and chairs to ceramics and coffeemakers — and his buildings, including the brawny Pirelli Tower (1956) in his native Milan, and the castle-like Denver Art Museum (1971), were erected in 14 countries. Through Domus, the magazine he founded in 1928, Ponti brought attention to virtually every significant movement and creator in the spheres of modern art and design.

The questing intelligence Ponti brought to Domus is reflected in his work: as protean as he was prolific, Ponti’s style can’t be pegged to a specific genre. In the 1920s, as artistic director for the Tuscan porcelain maker Richard Ginori, he fused old and new; his ceramic forms were modern, but decorated with motifs from Roman antiquity. In pre-war Italy, modernist design was encouraged, and after the conflict, Ponti — along with designers such as Carlo Mollino, Franco Albini, Marco Zanuso — found a receptive audience for their novel, idiosyncratic work. Ponti’s typical furniture forms from the period, such as the wedge-shaped Distex chair, are simple, gently angular, and colorful; equally elegant and functional. In the 1960s and ’70s, Ponti’s style evolved again as he explored biomorphic shapes, and embraced the expressive, experimental designs of Ettore Sottsass Jr., Joe Colombo and others.

His signature furniture piece — the one by which he is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Germany’s Vitra Design Museum and elsewhere — is the sleek Superleggera chair, produced by Cassina starting in 1957. (The name translates as “superlightweight” — advertisements featured a model lifting it with one finger.) Ponti had a playful side, best shown in a collaboration he began in the late 1940s with the graphic artist Piero Fornasetti. Ponti furnishings were decorated with bright finishes and Fornasetti's whimsical lithographic transfer prints of things such as butterflies, birds or flowers; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts possesses a 1950 secretary from their Architetturra series, which feature case pieces covered in images of building interiors and facades. The grandest project Ponti and Fornasetti undertook, however, lies on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean: the interiors of the luxury liner Andrea Doria, which sank in 1956.

Widely praised retrospectives at the Queens Museum of Art in 2001 and at the Design Museum London in 2002 sparked a renewed interest in Ponti among modern design aficionados. (Marco Romanelli’s monograph written for the London show, offers a fine overview of Ponti’s work.) Today, a wide array of Ponti’s designs are snapped up by savvy collectors who want to give their homes a touch of Italian panache and effortless chic.

Find a range of Gio Ponti furniture on 1stDibs.

The lighting company Arredoluce opened in 1943, at the start of a golden era of modernist Italian design, and was born of the confluence of an eager entrepreneurial business spirit and a fresh, innovative, forward-looking creative atmosphere.

Angelo Lelii (1911–79), the founder of Arredoluce, which was based in the Milanese district of Monza, was a gifted and at times brilliant designer. He had the insight to commission works from other greats of the day, including Gio Ponti, Vico Magistretti, the brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and Ettore Sottsass Jr.

Lelii’s designs cover a broad aesthetic range. His most famous work, the Triennale floor lamp (circa 1947), is both elegant and practical, with three omnidirectional lighting booms attached to a central pole. His well-known ceiling light of 1954 — in which a conical canister bounces light upward off a lighting-arced enameled-aluminum sheet — is a piece of design poetry. And his 1962 Cobra table lamp has a wild, almost surreal look, featuring a sculptured rod of polished metal with a socket that, like his Eye floor lamp of the early 1960s, holds an eyeball-like directional bulb. 

Arredoluce also placed few constraints on the creativity of the designers it employed from outside the company. The Castiglioni brothers’ Turbino table lamp of 1951, for example, is a remarkably early example of minimalist design. The company both fostered the tradition-minded aspect of Gio Ponti’s sensibility and produced several of his experimental pieces in Lucite in the 1950s; and Sottsass’s UFO table lamp of 1957, a sandwich of two plastic bubbled tablets on four legs, prefigures the look of his postmodern works for the Memphis Group by more than 20 years. From the stylish and utilitarian to the avant-garde, lighting by Arredoluce includes some of the most diverse, remarkable — and collectible — designs of the late 20th century.