Tartar Bookcase by Ettore Sottsass for MEMPHIS Srl

Ettore Sottsass, 1985

Dimensions:

• W: 76.77 in
  D: 33.46 in
  H: 30.71 in

The Tartar sideboard by Ettore Sottsass for Memphis (1985) is remarkable in several ways. Sottsass once concurred that this iconoclastic piece was an avid attempt to create a Sottsassian-Cubist work, elements that were 3-D visible from many angles (as Picasso once pioneered with painting & sculpture).

Yet it also implements a very curious and beautiful form of laminate created by him, a reconstituted veneer that "elongated" and blew-up the veining of the natural wood. It was a process that required stacking hundreds of bookmatched sheets of wooden veneer that were glued, compressed and then sawn on the diagonal.

Sottsass therein found another way to "decorate" with a natural material.

-KJ