When I first embarked on the journey of studying Carlo Mollino, it was hardly in my vision that it became one of the most challenging tasks I ever got my hands on. After reviewing books, essays, and panel discussions, the image of this creative genius of modern Italian design is only getting more mysterious and enigmatic. And it’s all due to the complexity of Mollino. Carlo Mollino was a holistic man with multiple façades. He is an architect, an interior designer, a furniture designer, a professional skier, a racing car designer, an aerobatic pilot, a writer and a photographer (Mollino’s erotic polaroids inspired Jeremy Scott for Moschino’s fall-winter 2018/19 pre-collection). Besides, his approach to architecture projects and his design style continue to evolve throughout his life. Which makes him not definable by any school — a true modern eclecticism. One of the repercussions of being a non-conforming disobedient is that Mollino was always considered a “bad boy” in Turin’s art and architecture circle and never an orthodox in any spectrum of his work. But I trust he couldn’t care less about that.
If we let go of the presumptuous ambition to categorise an organic individualist into a labelled cage, we shall free ourselves from the dreadful schematic review of Carlo Mollino’s intricate design journey and joyfully receive the aesthetic ecstasy by lay our eyes selectively on one table from Mollino — the Vertebra table designed for the Lattes publishing house in Turin. The table is perceived as a timeless masterpiece by collectors, the work also reveals the mastermind behind it. Just like what Mollino wrote in the essay Utopia and Setting in 1949： “Every act reveals its author, every work is made in the image and likeness of he who made it”.
A prior version of the Vertebra table was made for the exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today in 1950. On 28th October 2020, the exhibited dining table that belongs to the Brooklyn Museum was listed among Alexander Calder, Mark Rothko and Jean-Michel Basquiat in a contemporary art auction of Sotheby’s and sold at a record-breaking price of over 6 million USD. The Vertebra table for Lattes publishing house, made in late 1950, is the concluded version of the auctioned dining table. It’s worth emphasising that these two pieces are the only two large moulded plywood dining tables by Mollino. They mark the pivotal point of the last phase of Mollino’s furniture design, which evolved from the early stage of Surrealism (1936-1940) to Organic (1941-1949) and finally to the sinuous Linear approach (1949-1953).
