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Vintage 'Donau' Collection Coffee Table by Ettore Sottsass and Marco Zanini

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Ettore Sottsass & Marco Zanini for Leitner Donau Collection Bed and Nightstand

$12,500per set

£9,484.71per set

€10,844.92per set

CA$17,459.11per set

A$19,412.16per set

CHF 10,135.96per set

MX$236,293.20per set

NOK 129,330.39per set

SEK 121,176.40per set

DKK 80,937.64per set

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About the Item

A rare and iconic Italian post-modern Donau Collection bed and matching nightstand designed by master architect and furniture designer Ettore Sottsass (Austria/Italy, 1917-2007) in collaboration with Marco Zanini (Milan, Italy; b.1971) for Leitner Interior Design, circa 1988. Scarce design, bold and dramatic, sculptural-form, exceptionally executed in bird’s-eye maple lacquered and laminated wood, including blue accents and columns that offer a visually striking contrast. Retaining the original manufacturer's label, signed, 195/88. Provenance / Acquisition: Acquired from highly reputable auction house Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Texas. Design Signature Auction catalog #8110 Dimensions: (approx) Bed: (Twin XL) 42.5" High, 40.5" Wide, 84.75" Deep Bedside Table: 17.75" High, 32" Wide, 23.75" Deep Detailed Condition Report: Excellent original vintage condition. Very strong, sturdy, stable and structurally sound. Presents well. May have minor wear consistent with age and use, including very minor lacquer loss to top edge of headboard and small loss to wood at one side rail, overall superb examples. About the designer: Ettore Sottsass (b.Innsbruck, Austria 1917 – d.Milan, Italy 2007) was a celebrated 20th century Italian architect, noted for also designing furniture, jewellery, glass, lighting, home and office wares, as well as numerous buildings and interiors — often defined by bold colors. Ettore Sottsass worked as an architect with his father, often on new modernist versions of buildings that were destroyed during the war. In 1947, living in Milan, he set up his own architectural and Industrial Design studio, where he began to create work in a variety of different media: ceramic, painting, sculpture, furniture, photography, jewelry, architecture and interior design. With the rise of new groups (Global tools, Archizoom, Superstudio, UFO, Zzigurat, 9999.) the handmade appeared suddenly as the new game for experimentation, a lot of these new groups playing in this new/old path to renew creation. In October 1980, Sottsass was confronted with two proposals, one from Renzo Brugola, a dear old friend and carpenter, telling him his will "to make something together like in the good old times,” and the other one from Mario and Brunella Godani, owners of the Design Gallery Milano, who asked him to create "new furniture" for their gallery. In 1957, Sottsass joined Poltronova, a semi-Industrial producer of contemporary furniture, as an artistic consultant. Much of the furniture he worked on there influenced the design he would create later with Memphis Milano. In 1956, Sottsass was hired by Adriano Olivetti as a design consultant for Olivetti, to design electronic devices and develop the first Italian mainframe computer, the Elea 9003 for which he was awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1959. He also designed office equipment, typewriters, and furniture. There Sottsass made his name as a designer who, through color, form and styling, managed to bring office equipment into the realm of popular culture Ettore Sottsass founded the Memphis Group in Milan on 11 December 1980, after the Bob Dylan song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" played during the group's inaugural meeting. The group was active from 1981 to 1988. The Memphis Group was created in a reaction against the status quo. Sottsass centered the group's thinking around “radical, funny, and outrageous”—essentially, disregarding what was considered in “good taste” at that time. Art Deco, the color palette of Pop Art and Kitsch theme from the 1950s inspired their work. The Memphis Group's (also known as Memphis Milano) work often incorporated plastic, laminate and terrazzo materials in their work and and incorporated in floors, tables and lamps, all characterized by ephemeral design featuring colorful and abstract decoration as well as asymmetrical shapes, sometimes arbitrarily alluding to exotic or earlier styles and designs. Sottsass also designed his own print. This was a squiggles print also known as Bacterio print. For the print, Sottsass used inspiration from the surface texture and form of a Buddhist temple in Madurai, India, he then abstracted this detail into the squiggles he named Bacterio. This pattern was then used on their furniture designs in as veneers and textiles. The Memphis Group was a postmodern, collaborative, architecture and Design Group founded by Sottsass in Milan Italy. The group focused heavily on furniture design with an emphasis on unconventional types. The designers became well known for their bright and bold pieces with clashing colors. At the time, furniture was solely meant to be functional. However, the Memphis Group sought to prove otherwise with their highly decorative pieces. They poked fun at everyday pieces and turned them into works of art. Many criticized and said it was just a trend that wouldn’t last. Their unconventional ideas were controversial but have now become widely recognized and appreciated. The work continues to be influential throughout the world and can be seen in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Design Museum in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and many others. As the Memphis movement in the 1980s attracted attention worldwide for its energy and flamboyance, Ettore Sottsass began assembling a major design consultancy, which he named Sottsass Associati. Sottsass Associati was established in 1980 and gave the possibility to build architecture on a substantial scale as well as to design for large international industries. Besides Ettore Sottsass, the others founding members were Aldo Cibic, MarCo Marabelli, Matteo Thun and Marco Zanini. Later, also Johanna Grawunder, MarCo Susani, James Irvine, and Mike Ryan will join the firm. In the late 1980s, Sottsass left Memphis to focus on the Associati. Sottsass Associati, primarily an architectural practice, also designed elaborate stores and showrooms for Esprit, identities for Alessi, exhibitions, interiors, consumer electronics in Japan and furniture of all kinds. The studio was based on the cultural guidance of Ettore Sottsass and the work conducted by its many young associates, who quite often left to open their own studios. Sottsass Associati is now based in London and Milan and continue to sustain the work, philosophy and culture of the studio. His work is featured around the world, as stunning buildings and highlighting museum collections. As an Industrial designer, his clients included Fiorucci, Esprit, the Italian furniture company Poltronova, Knoll International, Serafino Zani, Alessi, Brondi, and Brionvega. As an architect, he designed the Mayer-Schwarz Gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, with its dramatic doorway made of irregular folds and jagged angles, and the home of David M. Kelley, designer of Apple's first computer mouse, in Woodside, California. The interiors of the Malpensa Airport, in Milan, were designed by Sottsass in the late 1990s, but he did not architect the building. In the mid-1990s, he designed the sculpture garden and entry gates of the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg Gallery at the campus of Cal Poly Pomona. He collaborated with well-known figures in the architecture and design field, including Aldo Cibic, James Irvine, Matteo Thun. Sottsass created a vast body of work: furniture, jewelry, ceramics, glass, silver work, lighting, office machine design and buildings. He inspired generations of architects and designers. In 2006 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held the first major museum survey exhibition of his work in the United States. A retrospective exhibition, Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress, was held at the Design Museum in London in 2007. In 2009, the Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht presented a re-construction of a Sottsass' exhibition 'Miljö för en ny planet' (Landscape for a new planet), which took place in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 1969. In 2017, on the occasion of Sottsass' 100th birthday, the Met Breuer museum in New York City presented the retrospective Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical. One of his works—Telefono Enorme, designed with David M. Kelley for Brondi—is part of the MOMA Collection, as well as many drawings. Design objects and drawings by Sottsass are also in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Design Museum in London, the Vitra Design Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of fine Arts, Houston. In 1999, he was awarded the Sir Misha Black award and was added to the College of Medallists. In 2023, his work was included in the exhibition Mirror Mirror: Reflections on Design at Chatsworth at Chatsworth House.

Creator:

Memphis Group (Workshop/Studio),Marco Zanini (Designer),Ettore Sottsass (Designer),Memphis Milano (Workshop/Studio)

Dimensions:

Height: 42.5 in (107.95 cm)Width: 40.5 in (102.87 cm)Depth: 84.75 in (215.27 cm)

Sold As:

Set of 2

Style:

Post-Modern (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Laminate,Wood,Hand-Crafted,Veneer

Place of Origin:

Italy

Period:

1980-1989

Date of Manufacture:

circa 1988

Condition:

Wear consistent with age and use. Excellent original vintage condition. Very strong, sturdy, stable, structurally sound. Presents very well. May have minor wear consistent w/ age/use, including very minor lacquer loss to top edge of headboard, small loss to wood at one side rail. A+.

Seller Location:

Forney, TX

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU5977233467062

Shop All Ettore Sottsass

Ettore Sottsass

An architect, industrial designer, philosopher and provocateur, Ettore Sottsass led a revolution in the aesthetics and technology of modern design in the late 20th century. He was a wild man of the Radical Design movement that swept Italy in the late 1960s and ’70s, rejecting rationalism and modernism in favor of ever-more outrageous imaginings in lighting and furniture such as mirrors, lamps, chairs and tables.

Sottsass was the oldest member of the Memphis Group — a design collective, formed in Milan in 1980, whose irreverent, spirited members included Alessandro Mendini, Michele de Lucchi, Michael Graves and Shiro Kuramata. All had grown disillusioned by the staid, black-and-brown “corporatized” modernism that had become endemic in the 1970s. Memphis (the name stemmed from the title of a Bob Dylan song) countered with bold, brash, colorful, yet quirkily minimal designs for furniture, glassware, ceramics and metalwork.

The Memphis Group mocked high-status by building furniture with inexpensive materials such as plastic laminates, decorated to resemble exotic finishes such as animal skins. Their work was both functional and — as intended — shocking.

Even as it preceded the Memphis Group's formal launch, Sottsass's iconic Ultrafragola mirror — in its conspicuously curved plastic shell and radical pops of pink neon — embodies many of the collective's postmodern ideals.

Sottsass created innovative furnishings for the likes of Artemide, Knoll, Zanotta and Poltronova, where he reigned as artistic director for nearly two decades beginning in 1958. His most-recognized designs appeared in the first Memphis collection, issued in 1981 — notably the multihued, angular Carlton room divider and Casablanca bookcase. As pieces on 1stDibs demonstrate, however, Sottsass is at his most inspired and expressive in smaller, secondary furnishings such as lamps and chandeliers, and in table pieces and glassware that have playful and sculptural qualities.

Sottsass left the Memphis Group in 1985 in order to concentrate on the growth of Sottsass Associati, a design and architecture consultancy he cofounded in 1980.

It was as an artist that Sottsass was celebrated in his life, in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2006, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art a year later. Even then Sottsass’s work prompted critical debate. And for a man whose greatest pleasure was in astonishing, delighting and ruffling feathers, perhaps there was no greater accolade. That the work remains so revolutionary and bold — that it breaks with convention so sharply it will never be considered mainstream — is a testament to his genius.

Find Ettore Sottsass lighting, decorative objects and furniture for sale on 1stDibs.

Shop All Memphis Milano

Memphis Milano

To many people, postmodern design is synonymous with the Memphis Group. This Italian collaborative created the most radical and attention-getting designs of the period, upending most of the accepted standards of how furniture should look. Today, the Memphis Milano brand, which is managed by Alberto Bianchi Albrici, still produces designs created by the group between 1981 and 1988.

The Memphis story begins in 1980, when Ettore Sottsass, then a beacon of Italian postmodernism, tapped a coterie of younger designers to develop a collection for the Milan Furniture Fair the next year, determined that all the new furniture they were then seeing was boring. Their mission: Boldly reject the stark minimalism of the 1970s and shatter the rules of form and function. (Sottsass’s Ultrafragola mirror, designed in 1970, embodied many of what would become the collective’s postmodern ideals.)

The group decided to design, produce and market their own collection, one that wouldn’t be restricted by concerns like functionality and so-called good taste. Its debut, at Milan’s 1981 Salone del Mobile, drew thousands of viewers and caused a major stir in design circles.

So as a record of Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile” played on repeat, they took their name from the song, devised their marketing strategy and plotted the postmodern look that would come to define the decade of excess — primary colors, blown-up proportions, playful nods to Art Deco and Pop art. A high-low mix of materials also helped define Memphis, as evidenced by Javier Mariscal’s pastel serving trays, which feature laminate veneer — a material previously used only in kitchens — as well as Shiro Kuramata’s Nara and Kyoto tables made from colored glass-infused terrazzo.

An image of Sottsass posing with his collaborators in a conversation pit shaped like a boxing ring appeared in magazines all over the world, and Karl Lagerfield furnished his Monte Carlo penthouse entirely in Memphis furniture. Meanwhile, members like Andrea Branzi, Aldo Cibic, Michele de Lucchi, Nathalie du Pasquier, Kuramata, Paola Navone, Peter Shire, George Sowden, Sottsass and his wife, journalist Barbara Radice, went on to enjoy fruitful careers.

Some people think of the Milan-based collective as the design equivalent to Patrick Nagel’s kitschy screenprints, but for others Memphis represents what made the early 1980s so great: freedom of expression, dizzying patterns and off-the-wall colors.

Eventually, the Reagan era gave way to cool 1990s minimalism, and Memphis fell out of fashion. Sottsass left the group in 1985, and by 1987, it had disbanded. Yet decades later, Memphis is back and can be traced to today’s most exciting designers.

Materials

Brass

Incredibly rare and exceptional post-modern coffee table by the two of the masters of design, Ettore Sottsass and Marco Zanini. Table is executed in birds eye maple has blue tubular ...

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