Founder of the influential Memphis collective, the architect and designer Ettore Sottsass was also a friend of Dylan, Picasso, Hemingway – and many women, as a lavish monograph reveals

Study for the Lora Totino villa, 1951. © Erik & Petra Hesmerg, © CSAC Parma/© Studio Ettore Sottsass

The receptionist gave me a fax and an odd look. It said, in handwritten capitals: "DEAR ROWAN MOORE… THANK YOU FOR EVER… ETTORE", above a drawing of a dishevelled bed with condoms and discarded underwear on the floor beside. It was from Ettore Sottsass, then approaching 80 years old, who liked a review I had written for the magazine where I was then working, of a book of his photographs. The review had noted his camera's fondness for post-coital beds, hence the drawing.

Sottsass (1917-2007) is now remembered most as the godfather of Memphis, the design collective whose much-imitated works released a flood of wonky angled, brightly coloured furniture in laminated plastic, striped, polka-dotted and leopard-skinned, on the 1980s. Memphis was launched in a Milan gallery in September 1981, in a near riot of 2,000 people (amazing that furniture can arouse such passions). Its original pieces now sell in auction houses for prodigious sums.

As usual in such cases, the imitators betray the inventors, and actual Sottsass designs from this period have a spirit, a presence and a touch that make their calculated outrages against taste all the more powerful. The copies are plain outrageous. But, as a handsome new Phaidon monograph amply shows, Sottsass was very much more than Memphis. At a hundred pounds sterling and seven pounds avoirdupois, it is both weighty and expensive, but within its pistachio covers and striped endpapers, on pages of varying stock and multiple colours, a life of astonishing richness is revealed. It shows a man whose young, dashing moustache becomes progressively more mournful and perplexed, but whose appetite for life never diminished....Continue Reading

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