Post-Modern Prints
Strictly speaking, postmodern design was a short-lived movement that manifested itself chiefly in Italy and the United States in the early 1980s. The characteristics of postmodern furniture and other postmodern objects included hot-colored, loud-patterned, usually plastic surfaces; strange proportions and weird angles; and a vague-at-best relationship between form and function.
Critics derided postmodern design as a grandstanding bid for attention and nothing of consequence. The fact that, decades later, postmodern design still has the power to provoke thoughts (along with other reactions) proves they were not entirely correct.
Postmodernism began as an architectural critique. Starting in the 1960s, a small cadre of mainly American architects began to argue that modernism, once high-minded and even noble in its goals, had become stale, stagnant and blandly corporate. In the next decade in Milan, a cohort of designers led by Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini brought the discussion to bear on design.
Sottsass and Michele de Lucchi, in 1980, gathered a core group of young designers, which would come to include Michael Graves, Marco Zanini, Shiro Kuramata and Matteo Thun, into a design collective they called Memphis. The Memphis Group saw design as a means of communication and they wanted it to shout. That it did: the first Memphis collection appeared in 1981 and broke all the modernist taboos, embracing irony, kitsch, wild ornamentation and bad taste.
Memphis works remain icons of postmodernism: the Sottsass Casablanca bookcase, with its leopard-print plastic veneer; de Lucchi’s First chair, which has been described as having the look of an electronics component; Martine Bedin’s Super lamp: a pull-toy puppy on a power cord leash. After the initial Memphis show caused an uproar, postmodern design quickly took off in America. The architect Robert Venturi had already begun a series of plywood chairs for Knoll Inc. with beefy, exaggerated silhouettes of traditional styles such as Queen Anne and Chippendale. In 1982, the new firm Swid Powell enlisted a group of top American architects, including Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Stanley Tigerman and Venturi to create postmodern tableware in silver, ceramic and glass.
On 1stDibs, the collection of postmodern furniture includes seating, decorative objects, lighting fixtures and more.
Late 20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
21st Century and Contemporary American Post-Modern Prints
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1990s American Post-Modern Prints
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Mid-20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century North American Post-Modern Prints
Glass, Paper
Late 20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
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1970s Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Glass, Paper
Late 20th Century Austrian Post-Modern Prints
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1980s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century French Post-Modern Prints
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1970s Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century Post-Modern Prints
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1980s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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1970s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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21st Century and Contemporary American Post-Modern Prints
Metal
Late 20th Century English Post-Modern Prints
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2010s Spanish Post-Modern Prints
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1970s English Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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1970s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Metal, Chrome
1980s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Canvas, Glass, Wood
Late 20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
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21st Century and Contemporary Mexican Post-Modern Prints
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1980s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Chrome
1970s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
Aluminum
1980s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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1970s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Acrylic, Wood, Paper
Late 20th Century English Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century Post-Modern Prints
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Mid-20th Century English Post-Modern Prints
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1970s French Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Other
Late 20th Century German Post-Modern Prints
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1970s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Glass, Paper
Early 2000s German Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century Austrian Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century North American Post-Modern Prints
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2010s Brazilian Post-Modern Prints
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1990s American Post-Modern Prints
Late 20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
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21st Century and Contemporary American Post-Modern Prints
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1990s American Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century North American Post-Modern Prints
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Late 20th Century Post-Modern Prints
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1990s American Post-Modern Prints
Wood, Glass, Paper
1970s French Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Glass, Paper
1970s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Paper
1990s American Post-Modern Prints
Wood, Glass, Paper
1980s American Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Paint, Paper
2010s British Post-Modern Prints
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20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
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1960s French Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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1970s German Vintage Post-Modern Prints
Wood, Paper, Glass
2010s Brazilian Post-Modern Prints
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20th Century American Post-Modern Prints
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1980s Italian Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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1960s French Vintage Post-Modern Prints
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