'Siluro' Floor Lamp Angelo Lelli, Ettore Sottsass for Arredoluce, Italy, 1957

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.

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. They 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's 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 imaginative and expressive in smaller, secondary furnishings such as lamps and chandeliers, and in table pieces and glassware that have playful and sculptural qualities.

It was as an artist that Ettore 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.

The lighting company Arredoluce opened in 1943, at the start of a golden era of modernist Italian design, and was born of the confluence of an eager entrepreneurial business spirit and a fresh, innovative, forward-looking creative atmosphere.

Angelo Lelii (1911–79), the founder of Arredoluce, which was based in the Milanese district of Monza, was a gifted and at times brilliant designer. He had the insight to commission works from other greats of the day, including Gio Ponti, Vico Magistretti, the brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and Ettore Sottsass Jr.

Lelii’s designs cover a broad aesthetic range. His most famous work, the Triennale floor lamp (circa 1947), is both elegant and practical, with three omnidirectional lighting booms attached to a central pole. His well-known ceiling light of 1954 — in which a conical canister bounces light upward off a lighting-arced enameled-aluminum sheet — is a piece of design poetry. And his 1962 Cobra table lamp has a wild, almost Surrealist look, featuring a sculptured rod of polished metal with a socket that, like his Eye floor lamp of the early 1960s, holds an eyeball-like directional bulb. 

Arredoluce also placed few constraints on the creativity of the designers it employed from outside the company. The Castiglioni brothers’ Tubino table lamp of 1951, for example, is a remarkably early example of minimalist design. The company both fostered the tradition-minded aspect of Ponti’s sensibility and produced several of his experimental pieces in Lucite in the 1950s; and Sottsass’s UFO table lamp of 1957, a sandwich of two plastic bubbled tablets on four legs, prefigures the look of his postmodern works for the Memphis Group by more than 20 years.

From the stylish and utilitarian to the avant-garde, vintage Arredoluce floor lamps, table lamps, chandeliers and other lighting includes some of the most diverse, remarkable — and collectible — designs of the late 20th century.