Proust armchair hand-painted in 2006 original by Alessandro Mendini

Architect, designer, artist: Alessandro Mendini (1931-2019) renewed design both as an intellectual and theoretician and as a designer. An influential member of the Alchemy group and editor of Casabella (1970-1976), Modo (1977-1981) and Domus (1980-1985, 2010-2011), in his work he was directed toward radical design and neo-modern architecture “with a calligraphic, coloristic, symbolic, romantic and problematic approach to design.” Since then he has created a fairy-tale world of objects, furniture, prototypes, products, paintings, writings, environments, installations and situations that are often intertwined, complex, polemical, paradoxical ironic and literary. Mendini has collaborated with companies such as Alessi, Bisazza, Hermés, Philips, Swatch and many others and is a consultant to various companies, including in the Far East, on image and design.

The following is the story told by Alessandro Mendini himself, who recounts this extraordinary cult object born in 1978 by “the literary route” by reworking with a “pointillist” approach an 18th-century “fake,” a Baroque-style armchair.
“At first, in 1976, I thought together with Francesco Binfaré of the Cassina study center to make a ‘Proust fabric.’ We went to visit the places of Marcel Proust to draw stimuli in this regard. The idea was to arrive at the image of a surface and, later, the form of an object, through literary means. This project was not followed up, but the idea remained interesting to me. Having read and investigated Proust’s visual and object world, I then thought by myself to make a possible armchair of his, a “Proust armchair.” So, like other times I had imagined a “Giotto chair” or a “Cezanne table.” As for Proust, I was referring on the one hand to his descriptions of place and time, his endless play on memory, and on the other hand to the pictorial environment of Impressionism, the
divisionism and pointillism.
So I found a good ready-made in an eighteenth-century shaped armchair and chose some details from Signac paintings representing meadows. I combined them together as a texture that invades the whole chair, in the fabric parts and on the wooden parts, unraveling its shape into a kind of nebula. In addition to the idea of obtaining a design piece from an improper input to the normal design process, I also wanted to achieve this kind of result: that is, to make a culturally valid object from a fake, because the redesign in question is accomplished on a kitsch armchair, still mass-produced “fake antique.” And still latent was a more general and vast working hypothesis, which I later addressed with “Interno di un interno” at the Dilmos gallery in Milan in the year 1991: that is, to elaborate pointillist textures to obtain objects, architectures and paintings that are pulviscular and unreal, almost like energetic mirages suitable for meditative and immaterial environments.
The first “Proust Armchair” was made in 1978, as an element among others in my “Century Room,” with pieces also built by Alchimia (Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, “Close Encounters of Architecture” with Andrea Branzi and Ettore Sottsass). In the same year that hall was brought to Paolo Portoghesi’s Venice Biennale. I bought the drum in the Veneto on a trip I made with Sandro Guerriero and had it hand-decorated by brush in acrylic colors by two skilled young painters, Prospero Rasulo and Pier Antonio Volpini. Later purchased by Cinzia Ruggeri from Alchimia, this first armchair has now been part of Guido Antonello’s collection in Milan for several years. After the first specimen, a few more were made because the chair was included in the Bau-Haus 1st catalog of Alchemy (1979). From a certain point Franco Migliaccio, a very good painter and art critic from Milan, began hand-decorating it on rough wood and white canvas drums made in Lombardy.
Sometimes the fabric changed, as did the shape of the seat and the colors from cloth instead of acrylics. From then until 1987 Alchemy made, perhaps painted by others, a number of them, which I do not know well: perhaps fifteen or more. I did not keep track of it. The hypothesis was and is to redo them without ever numbering them but putting the date on them.
Alchemy sold them in different places and at different costs, which I also do not know. I know that one is in Ghent in Belgium at the Museum of Applied Arts, two at the Museum of Groningen in the Netherlands, one at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris in France, one at the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf-Im-Ehrenhof, one at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, one at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein, one at Die Neue Sammlung in Nuremberg, two at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and one at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in the United States, one at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada; in the United States they were purchased by collectors Sidney Lewis, Bob Wilson, Peter Zweig; one was purchased in South Korea by Chang Gul Cho. It was also purchased by some galleries: Rocca 6, Turin; Paola and
Rossella Colombari, Milan; Yves Gastou, Paris; Art & Industry and Urban Art Architecture in New York; Grace Design, Dallas; Kaess-Weiss, Stuttgart; Made In, Düsseldorf; Seibu Warehouse, Tokyo. It was auctioned at Christie’s in London.
In 1980 the exhibition “Proust’s Armchair” was made in Florence at “Memories and Places of the 20th Century,” with the preparatory drawings and collages of both the object and the eventual fabric. Various preparatory sketches are the property of the Groninger Museum. I think I still have in the country a series of sketches from that time, perhaps in an album.
In 1981 I designed with Alchimia for the office furniture company MIM in the Milan showroom, the installation “Sentimental Robot.” Three chairs were made on purpose on that occasion. In 1984 Zabro (Alchimia-Zanotta) made on my recommendation some Proust armchairs painted in faux bronze (light and dark variant). In early 1988 I arranged with Alchemy that it would stop making armchairs. In fact, I could see that without my personal intervention and checking piece by piece, they were undergoing excessive transformations in overall texture, individual brush strokes, and colors. Any chairs made in Italy and abroad with an incorrect image, especially up to this period, are to be considered fake. In 1989 I resumed direct responsibility over armchair production. In 1991, a long couch was made for “Interior of an Interior,” where a bronze version (Fonderia Artistica Corti), which became a series of nine in 2009, and a large ceramic one for life (Paolo Bertozzi and Stefano Del Monte Casoni) were also made. Ownership of these first two specimens is held by the Groningen Museum. On this occasion, various furniture, objects, textiles and clothes were made with pointillist criteria. In early 2001, 12 more ceramic armchairs (total of 9 plus 4 author’s proofs) were made by Paolo Bertozzi and Stefano Del Monte Casoni, and in 2009 eight more bronze armchairs were produced at the De Andreis Foundry in Milan.
Now the “Proust Armchairs” continue to be made only inside Atelier Mendini even with continuous variations (of texture and color), each under my direct control, signed, dated and authenticated. They are either part of the Atelier’s “Historical Production” or are mine directly. A special chair was made in 1999 for a Bob Wilson show (Wilson property). One was done in 1998 in camouflage decoration for the Ecomimetic collection together with Prospero Rasulo. In the same year another one was made for the play “La Lupa” by Giovanni Verga, presented in some Italian theaters with dramatic red and black colors. One is named “Mozart’s Armchair” and was designed for a musical performance in Verona, with brushstrokes of great dimension. The current cycle of armchairs is mainly made by
by my niece Claudia Mendini, a painter, who interprets from time to time with sensitivity
discussing the various cases with me. In fact, as you can see, each chair has its own genesis and its own
history. The Cappellini company, then, has had in its catalog since 1994 a “Proust Armchair” made with
printed cotton fabric, of high quality and refined colors, produced in Como (the part in
wood is hand-painted). There are also small porcelain versions hand-painted in colors
acrylics (polychrome, gold, and white) also marketed by the Vitra Design Museum in
Weil am Rhein. They too are signed and dated. In addition, 150 miniature specimens in Celadon green ceramic were made in 2009 for Interart Gallery Seoul. Small ceramic versions were made in 2009 in Nove di Bassano by Supergo Editions: seventy polychrome stippled specimens and monochrome versions in twelve colors, each produced in 45 pieces.
In 2000 for the exhibition in Bonn, “Images Inside Me,” about 30 small dotted objects were made. The pointillist pattern has also been used by me in architecture on Abet plastic laminate (facades of a pavilion at the Groningen museum), and with Bisazza mosaic. There is also a Swatch entitled “Lots of Dots” (1992), punctuated by M. Christina Hamel. In 2001 for Alessi I designed a ceramic plate service and a large vase (print run 100 pieces), with a special edition of 36 pieces for the Fondation Cartier in Paris (coordination Annalisa Margarini). Also for Fondation Cartier in 2002, a series of 36 Murano glass vases by Venini (coordination Dorota Koziara) was produced.
In 2000 some chairs were exhibited at the Urban Architecture and Design Gallery in New York. The seats in that gallery are initialed “U.A.” Four new chairs were painted in early 2001 by graphic artist Jesus Moctezuma, with whom I experimented with new variations of dots and colors. The collaboration with Migliaccio also continues. In February 2001, an exhibition entitled “Miraggi” was held at the Jannone Gallery in Milan. Some of them are exhibits in Bonn, some of them are new. The catalog says, “These objects are like exercises. They take place around my mental fixity, elaborate circular ideas, are a kind of loss
of the times and places of my memory, rhythmic and repetitive. They are a monotonous act of dedication to the unknown, a collection of gestures, like breathing. Pointillism understood not as fractionalization
and visual recomposition of matter, but as attention to a universe made up of infinite memories and fragments (“the vertigo of the fragment” cited by Adorno, regarding Marcel Proust). In that
sense the pointillism I began to elaborate for “Proust’s Armchair” in 1975, stands for me as a method and a manifesto, my work being to be considered as a continuous system of fragments, a kind of milky way of memory. Actually all my objects, signs, brushstrokes, are part of an anonymous crowd of things, more or less significant.”
In 2005 for the “Art of Italian Design” exhibition in Athens, a giant version of the armchair (3x3x3 meters) was made by Bisazza and displayed outdoors in front of the Megaron Museum
Plus. Of the same size, but in papier-mâché, made by the craftsmen of the Viareggio carnival and painted by Claudia Mendini, there is a version owned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris (2002).
Cappellini in 2009 added to its catalog the Geometric Armchair, made from fabric
of printed cotton, high quality and refined colors (the wooden part is hand-painted). Three armchairs upholstered in gold-colored leather and wood frame covered in gold leaf and two are owned by Disney Cruise Line Magical Cruise Company in 2011. A unique and special version was made for the opera “Il matrimonio segreto” by Domenico Cimarosa, presented at the Coccia Theater in Novara, Italy, directed by Marco Castoldi, aka Morgan (2012).