CategoriesDesign Concepts and Techniques
Design by Artists
Furniture, textiles, ceramics and objects made by painters and sculptors, where an artist's language meets everyday use.
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About
In 1913 the critic and painter Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops in London, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant painted furniture, screens and textiles with bright abstraction. In Soviet Russia in the 1920s Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova designed printed fabrics, and in Paris Sonia Delaunay turned her colour theories into textiles and clothes. Surrealism made furniture strange: Salvador Dalí and his patron Edward James produced a sofa shaped like Mae West's lips in the late 1930s, while Alberto and Diego Giacometti cast lamps and vases for the decorator Jean-Michel Frank.
After the war Isamu Noguchi's Akari paper lights, first made in 1951, brought a sculptor's eye into homes. From the 1970s Donald Judd built severe plywood and metal furniture that he insisted was not sculpture, and Franz West made rough welded chairs and couches. Look for how closely an object follows the artist's other work.