Carlo Bugatti's French furniture - Italian furniture designer - Cover Story

Magazine Antiques, July, 1999 by Henry Hawley

Since a revival of interest in his work began in the 1960s, Carlo Bugatti has come to occupy a position of considerable significance in the history of European design. He is the only Italian of his generation who broke with the prevailing historicism of the nineteenth century and sought to create objects that did not directly imitate styles of the European past; he drew instead from more exotic sources - notably Islamic and Japanese art. Moreover, unlike many other European furniture designers working around 1900, he did not the dramatic whiplash line that distinguishes the decorative arts of the period and generally goes under the rubric of art nouveau.

Bugatti developed an extensive repertoire of furniture forms, and, since Italian furniture makers utilized handcraft production techniques fight through the nineteenth century, he was able to experiment with a variety of forms and techniques. After establishing a basic formula for a furniture design, he systematically varied it with small changes in functional elements or surface patterns, creating a series of related pieces. As a result, he appears to have produced more different designs than any of his contemporaries.

Information about Bugatti's life and creative activity is available primarily through contemporary publications and photographs of his work and through an unpublished biography written by his granddaughter L'Ebe Bugatti (b. 1905) in 1972.(1) Since she knew him only in his later years, details about his early life may not be entirely accurate, although she did consult family documents. She records that Bugatti was born in Milan in 1856 and as a youth studied at the Brera Academy there, becoming a close friend of the painter Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899). Their friendship was further strengthened when Bugatti's sister married Segantini in 1880. According to L'Ebe Bugatti, her grandfather also studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but he returned to Milan to begin working and occupied several premises there in the 1880s and 1890s. He appears to have moved to Paris after 1900, and around 1910 he and his wife and daughter moved to Pierrefonds, northeast of Paris. In the mid-1930s, after the deaths of several family members, he went to live with his only surviving child, Ettore (1881-1947), who manufactured the famous Bugatti automobiles at Molsheim in Alsace. There, Carlo Bugatti died in April 1940, apparently almost entirely forgotten as the creator of furniture and metalwork of great originality.

A certain amount of documentation survives regarding Bugatti's Milanese furniture, some of which was signed and some of which was included in exhibitions that were covered in contemporary publications. For example, several drawings of his pieces in an exhibition of Italian art held in London in 1888 appeared in British publications at the time.(2) From these sources it is possible to deduce the elements of Bugatti's mature Milan style. His furniture often included Islamic elements, such as pointed or onion-shaped arches. Surfaces were decorated with geometric marquetry, chiefly of wood and metal, or with more freely designed white metal inlays of Japanese inspiration. Also derived from the Japanese were animals and plants, painted in brown monochrome on panels of vellum glued to the wooden carcasses of his furniture. Objects were further enriched with silk fringes and cords and with round metal plaques or rectilinear strips of metal with relief decoration.

Photographs of Bugatti's furniture as installed in an Italian national exhibition held in Turin in 1898 indicate that his work had not undergone any fundamental changes in style since 1888, although the use of vellum and of silk fringes and tassels had increased.(3) For the Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Decorativa Moderna, held in Turin in 1902, Bugatti provided several individual objects and four room-like settings complete with furnishings.(4) Some of the pieces reflected the style in which he had been working since 1888, but others were in a new mode. Strongly plastic forms were sculpted from wooden blocks that had been glued together and then entirely covered with vellum so that the joints were no longer visible. The vellum was painted with motifs derived from plants or insects executed in a highly stylized rectilinear fashion. Details or backgrounds were sometimes painted in red, green, or gold. Exemplifying this new style is the picture frame shown in Plate II, which was included in the bedroom setting designed by Bugatti for the 1902 exhibition.

Perhaps the single most sensational exhibit at the Turin show was Bugatti's Snail Room, the design of which was inspired by the snail and its shell. Widely published in contemporary periodicals, the Snail Room contained what is possibly the most inventive piece of furniture Bugatti ever designed - the so-called Cobra or G-shaped chair (Pl. III). With a seat that was supported only at the front and did not touch the back, the chair had a profound influence on both Bugatti's own later work and on twentieth-century furniture design as a whole, particularly in the use of cantilevered seats.