Playing on Furniture
February 2007
When New York antiques dealer Louis Bofferding mounted an exhibition of furniture designs by |
Etruscan chair, c. 1979, white leather and lacquered wood. |
While Dickinson was indeed very much of his time, his designs continue to resonate today. Born in Berkeley, California, in 1920, he attended New York’s Parsons School of Design, before returning to San Francisco where he launched his interior design business around 1959 in a former firehouse that survived the 1906 earthquake. With his debonair style—he was typically clad in Gap chino pants and a custom-made English jacket, and drove a black Jaguar—it is not surprising that Dickinson attracted a clientele that included many of the Bay Area’s most prominent residents—who were no doubt charmed as much by his charisma as his innovative designs. However, Dickinson did not necessarily cater to his clients’ wishes. He was an ensemblier—someone who controls every aspect of a room’s design. (In that respect, he followed in the footsteps of French Art Deco designer Jean-Michel Frank.) “What I do is always mine…that a room should reflect the client more than the decorator … is utter nonsense,” he once said. “My rooms always end up looking like me.” He sometimes went to extremes to ensure his vision remained intact. At one point, he designed a carpet with a specific block pattern to indicate the placement of the room’s furniture and discourage any rearrangement.
Dickinson was noted for monochromatic interiors reminiscent of the work of English designer Syrie Maugham in the 1930s. He believed that strong shapes take the place of color and possessed an uncanny sense of scale and proportion, which he said creates drama in a room. But above all, it is his unique and often playful designs that immediately identify a Dickinson interior.
The 1960s was a time of experimentation, new uses for industrial materials and growing awareness of the environment. It was also the period when Dickinson began to create plaster tables and chairs supported by animal-form legs and floor lamps standing on bases shaped like thigh bones—arrangements that never struck him as macabre. “I simply felt there was a need for a new motif in design,” he explained. He fashioned consoles of galvanized tin inspired by a carpet thrown over a table in his bedroom, molding the metal into deep folds to emulate fabric. One of his last pieces was a wood table carved and lacquered to resemble a cube covered in a mover’s quilt. His inspiration came from sources as varied as tribal Africa, Etruscan civilization, Stonehenge and French Art Deco designers.
After his death in 1982, Dickinson’s work was revered by the design community, but only in the past few years has he come to be recognized by a wider audience. In 2003 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized “Fantasy and Function: The Furniture of John Dickinson.” Darrin Alfred, curatorial associate of architecture and design at SFMOMA, says, “Dickinson had a visual library. He could look at different periods and styles and create designs that fuse past and present.” The exhibition, comprising a dozen pieces of furniture—including a selection designed for Macy’s—and more than 30 working drawings, were taken from the museum’s permanent collection, the largest in the country. Many of these works were donated by Carlene Safdie, Dickinson’s muse and main patron, who had commissioned him to design the Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa, one of only a few commercial projects Dickinson undertook. The hotel’s interiors have been described as high chic with a touch of Deco.
In the past couple of years, auction houses nationwide have begun to include Dickinson pieces in
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Bone table lamp, |
New York dealer Liz O’Brien, a specialist in mid-century furniture, often stocks works by Dickinson and currently has a half-dozen pieces, including a tin console table and a plaster Etruscan table. Prices range from $8,000 to $35,000. “Dickinson’s furniture designs have an object-like quality,” she says. “Placed in an interior, they act like sculpture.”
New York correspondent Doris Goldstein frequently reports on design and the decorative arts for Art & Antiques.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
►Bonhams & Butterfields
Los Angeles, 323.850.7500
New York, 212.717.9007
www.butterfields.com
►Liz O’Brien
New York, 212.755.3800
www.lizobrien.com
►Los Angeles Modern Auctions
Peter Loughrey, head.
323.904.1950
www.lamodern.com
►Louis Bofferding
New York, 212.744.6725
►San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
415.357.4000
www.sfmoma.org
►Sotheby’s, New York
James Zemaitis, director of 20th-century decorative arts and design department.
212.607.7000
www.sothebys.com
►wright
Chicago, 312.563.0020
www.wright20.com