Curator’s Eye

We asked custodians of leading twentieth-century decorative arts collections to discuss one object they feel is particularly noteworthy. Here is a gallery of their choices.


Ron Arad
Rover chair
Designed 1981























“The Rover represents so much about both Ron Arad and the spirit of design in the early 80s. It is a key piece in MoMA’s current exhibition about his work—the first museum retrospective on Ron’s career.We titled the show “No Discipline” in reference to a remark he once made about his creations:‘It’s not design, it’s not art. I’m just doing what comes to me.” The legend is that Arad found some seats from a Rover 200 car in a scrapyard, picked them up, and attached tubular steel legs. They are a beautiful example of a kind of individualistic, post-punk view on design. Designers like Tom Dixon—making striking objects from junk—are part of the same gestalt.The Rover chairs are a perfect emblem of the renegade spirit of the 80s—when objects were produced from outside the mainstream of art and design.”

Paola Antonelli, Senior curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Donald Deskey
Table lamp
Designed circa 1927























“Strikingly modern in its zigzag design and use of aluminum, this outstanding table lamp designed by Donald Deskey is a recent gift to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from the noted collector John P. Axelrod, whose generosity has transformed the MFA's ability to display and interpret this ‘machine age’ era in American art and design. The lamp, along with a rare related ashtray also given by John, was featured in Deskey's ‘Man's Smoking Room’ installed at the American Designers' Gallery in New York in October 1928. That smoking room will be evoked in a gallery setting in the museum's new American Wing, scheduled to open in late 2010.”

Gerald Ward, Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


Joe Colombo,
Tube chair
Designed 1969



“Colombo’s Tube chair is a revolutionary piece of furniture. It is made of four PVC cylinders of varying sizes—which were surrounded in polyurethane foamed that was covered in either fabric or a plastic coating in bold colors, such as red or yellow.The tubes fit into one another, like Russian nesting dolls, and the lightweight chair came packaged in a drawstring burlap bag. It makes things so easy:You went to the store, picked up the bag, and assembled the chair yourself at home using padded clips that came with the tubes.There are many combinations possible when putting the cylinders together. What is truly remarkable about this design is that it embodies an ideal of mobile furniture, which corresponds to the relaxed lifestyle of the late 1960s.You could set up the Tube chair to watch television, or take it out into the backyard.”

Dominique Forest, Curator, Department of Modern/Contemporary Art,
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
Photo: Courtesy of Wright


Greg Lynn,
Sterling Silver Flatware
Designed 2007























“Through digital literacy and enhanced fabrication techniques, contemporary architects and designers have recently returned to the use of figurative characteristics in the design arts. Flatware has traditionally been a design object that employs floral motifs. Greg Lynn’s prototype flatware is a brilliant example of this reinterpretation of this tradition. Produced with a three-dimensional digital printing method that employed liquid metal, each piece was created by layering liquid forms atop one another. This flatware is also the first example of liquid metal to be used in rapid prototyping. The cutlery was conceived as a system of stem, leaf, and flowers that forms a single setting. Formally, the flatware reflects Lynn’s ongoing interest in Art Nouveau and the craft-laden designs of Victor Horta. Each piece is figuratively articulated and differentiated from the others to reflect its function. Collectively, the flatware presents itself as a bouquet of flowers.”

Joseph Rosa, John H. Bryan Curatorial Chair of Architecture and Design,
the Art Institute of Chicago




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