■ SET OF FOUR SIDE CHAIRS, attributed to Giovanni Michelucci (Pistoia, 1891 - Fiesole, 1990), produced by La Suppellettile, Pistoia, circa 1919, in solid walnut, the flat planar backrest inlaid at the upper register with a single triangular panel of red enamelled metal, the seat of solid walnut supported on squared legs joined by stretchers, the joinery exposed at the leg junctions in the austere architectonic vocabulary that would define Michelucci's mature output. The rigid squared geometry and the single graphic accent, positioned as formal punctuation rather than applied ornament, belong to the polemical rejection of the exhausted softness of the Liberty period that characterised the earliest Italian response to European modernism in the years immediately following the First World War.
Very good original condition consistent with a century of careful use, with light patina and minor surface marks to the wood; preventive conservation treatment recently undertaken in our Paris atelier. Dimensions, each: height 99 cm (39 inches); width 47 cm (18 ½ inches); depth 48 cm (18 ⅞ inches); seat height approximately 45 cm (17 ¾ inches).
Designed in the period immediately following Michelucci's return from the front, these chairs belong to the earliest documented body of his furniture - a body of work that precedes by more than a decade his emergence as one of the defining architects of twentieth-century Italy, author of the Santa Maria Novella railway station in Florence (1935) and the Church of San Giovanni Battista on the Autostrada del Sole (1964).
Bemporad records a closely related chair of 1919, executed in the La Suppellettile workshop on via Frosini in Pistoia, as the first known work by Michelucci in the field of furniture design, and identifies the inlaid enamelled triangle on the backrest as a workshop marker corroborating the attribution; she reads the design in relation to the small wood-and-stone church Michelucci designed near Caporetto while serving at the front. The survival of an intact set of four is uncommon for furniture of this period.
Literature:
□ D. L. Bemporad, Giovanni Michelucci: Il mobile degli anni giovanili, S.P.E.S., Florence, 1999, p. 91, a closely related chair illustrated.
Compare:
□ Closely related examples have appeared at auction with the same attribution.