36 ARCHDIGEST.COM
object lesson
A
round 1935, Spanish artist Salvador Dalí saw
something special in the face of movie star
Mae West: an apartment. In a watercolor, he
turned her blonde curls into portières, her
eyes into paintings, her nose into a fireplace,
and her lips into a divan. The last was a
furnishing so provocative that British arts patron Edward
James requested a three-dimensional version.
Dalí set to the task. The client deemed his first try, wrapped
in pink satin, “too showy.” James preferred the next two,
realized in 1938 by London decorators Green & Abbott in red
and green felt with black fringe. The pair—one is at the V&A;
the other failed to sell at Christie’s in June—were made for
Monkton House in West Sussex, a classical Edwin Lutyens
mansion that James recast as a Surrealist fantasia.
Around the same time, Dalí’s paean to West’s pout inspired
an upholstery project across the channel: Paris decorator
Jean-Michel Frank’s lips-shaped sofa for the fashion designer
Elsa Schiaparelli, colorfully clad to match her brand’s
“shocking” pink. Parisians got a peek at the ciré satin seat,
Vogue reported, when visitors to Galerie Beaux-Arts’ 1938
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme saw it displayed
in Frank’s next-door shop. Schiaparelli, though, rejected the
design, which ended up in the cinema-ballroom of Baron
Roland de l’Espée, one of Frank’s clients.
James commissioned five Dalí lips sofas, but there’s no
reliable count of the spin-offs, vetted and otherwise. A Pop
icon decades later, the seat was reenvisioned in 1970 by Italian
radical firm Studio 65, which produced a polyurethane riff
with Gufram (gufram.com; from $5,060). Two years later, Dalí
collaborated with Catalan architect Oscar Tusquets on another
example in polyethylene, which BD Barcelona began produc-
ing in 2004 (bdbarcelona.com; from $3,223). —HANNAH MARTIN
1. LIPS SOFAS IN
ARTS PATRON
EDWARD JAMES’S
WEST SUSSEX DINING
ROOM. 2. BOCCA
DARK LADY SOFA
BY STUDIO 65 FOR
GUFRAM, 2008.
3. DALÍ’S 1938 MAE
WEST LIPS SOFA.
4. A VINTAGE VERSION
HOLDS COURT IN
FASHION DESIGNER
DIANE VON
FURSTENBERG’S
MANHATTAN HOME.
4
2
3
1. ALAMY; 2. COURTESY OF GUFRAM; 3. COURTESY OF MUSEUM BOIJMANS VAN BEUNINGEN; 4. FRANÇOIS HALARD
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