Sideboard

Label TextAs sleek and sexy as its Italian contemporaries the Vespa scooter and the films of Federico Fellini, this sideboard, designed by Ico and Luisa Parisi, presents a chic example of Italian 20th-century postwar design. Designed for a dining room, its elegantly arranged and meticulously matched wood grains distinguish the angular lines of the horizontal body, which is raised on slender legs tapering at the front into gleaming protective brass sheaths, like a stiletto-clad leg seductively extended from beneath a skirt. Husband and wife Ico and Luisa Parisi were highly innovative players in Italian furniture design in the 1950s. After separately garnering success in architecture, airplane design, film, and photography, in 1947 the Parisis established La Ruota (the Wheel), a studio that specialized in interior design, producing ceramics and glassware along with furniture. In their sideboard the grace and fluidity of Modern sculpture is imbued with a refined structural dynamic indebted to the plywood models for the Parisis’ airplane designs.Published ReferencesToledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art Masterworks, Toledo, 2009, p. 332, repr. (col.).