Snake America is back: it is a newsletter covering vintage clothing (for GQ) and furniture (here) and strength sports (Inverse). Today, completed furniture auctions.
Cassina Frattini-style stacking stools, $325 (more with premium): Nice set of amateur Frattini-lookalike stools with counterintuitive negative legs (fewer than four) that are stackable. In a parallelogram way, one on top of another, where they fall over each other like heavy monstera leaves. The stools are not bad and seem done in the style of two Giancarlo Frattini commissions for Cassina, each stackable. The 780/783, from the ‘60s, have the same bent and are round, but when stacked they don’t let in any daylight. Frattini’s square stacking tables—I don’t remember the number but check out this auction—are the other, they look better stacked than the stools, both the real round Frattinis and these fake ones. (The round Frattinis are classified as stools and the square ones are tables. You need a shrink, priest or a mathematician to figure out why.) Lots of stackable furniture is ugly when it’s stacked. As in it just happens to be stackable, but it’s not nice when it is. Not sure the point of that as they’re stacked most of the time. Pass through the kitchen in the middle of the night and these ugly stacked stools—not these; other ones—sit all hideous and staring. The Frattinis on the other hand work for you all day long…
These particular stools (from the estate of Geraldine Shapiro) let daylight in when stacked but look pretty good like that and have a nice wood grain, too. The wood’s the best part. I Googled around to see which Geraldine died, and found several recent Obituary.com results in the tri-state area listing that name but going further than that felt too sad. Rest in peace across to all Geraldine Shapiros, may your memories be uplifted. Lower down in the Google search were Shapiro’s works — she was a sculptor — on auction with Briggs too. (Briggs sold her stools.) They’re not bad. Some of her sculptures to me look like plane propellers, and some don’t. Briggs also sold sculptures by her husband (I think). Here I admit the limits of my knowledge of pottery, sculpture, and the like, and my unrefined palate in that medium, and recuse myself from registering judgment on Shapiro’s posthumous oeuvre. All I can do here is commend the work. Which feels like a cheap way out, but that’s the point. The work lives on after you pass.
Another thing worth mentioning is LiveAuctioneers is the best place online to buy airplane propellers. If you’re not using them I mean. If you fly planes you’re on your own. I bet a real propeller store is the answer then, but buying a propeller from an airplane guy has to mean weeding through a whole lot of garbage. L-A doesn’t list too many: only 7,856 completed auctions. One auction from June 2018, it feels longer ago than that, was for a big chrome 70.5” long propeller that I remember watching as soon as it listed and loved the moment I saw it and watched it. To this day it’s the best propeller I’ve seen. Between its listing and auction I thought about it often, and in retrospect the month-long run-up between those two dates, and it selling for $425, is shorter than I felt at the time. I didn’t buy the propeller; I had nowhere to put it. Years have passed and my fears, that there’d be no more beautiful tall chrome propellers entering my life, that all the propellers were gone, that I’d never see one again… evaporated like rain on a sill. Of course, there’s regret: if you want a propeller and see a perfect one and don’t buy it, you pay for it now and then you pay for it later. A good one might not come around again soon. But in truth the world is full of propellers, lousy with them even, and they’re not worth hanging a day up. Like I said, much has changed. I don’t have the wall space to lean a propeller against anymore, and I’m no longer interested.
Frattini chair (lot passed): I wanted to buy this chair, the 831 lounge, also by Frattini, from IEGOR Auctions (sounds Russian) in Montreal where I lived for four years in three different apartments. (One was by a McDonald’s.) I decided against it. I don’t like the pink with the white, it looks too 1980s and like Debi Mazar’s apartment in the second half of Goodfellas. Which is great but not for my house. But I was willing to make an exception: it’s a chair, it’s cheap, it’s great. Compromise is important. What else are you going to read on? An upturned crate of bananas? A pile of oily rags? What if the rags catch fire? What then? Color barely matters anyways, especially in a room full of color. Starting to design a room with a chair raises the chair’s stakes, but if it’s the last piece it’s easy. It can be anything. It’s like how people with lots of tattoos can be a bit less judicious when adding another. A good room can absorb any piece of furniture. I used to have a theory that only people with lousy furniture, or who work in the business, are critical about people’s furniture choices, since they don’t understand the work it takes to constantly upgrade a room, but I’m not sure that’s right. Anyone can be critical about anything. Buying a clunker or a half-sour note is a good way to avoid your home turning into a showroom. So I was fine with the chair.
I wasn’t sure where to put it. In the kitchen? By the bananas? I asked friends with good design sense — this has been a three, maybe four-year process — about where a chair might fit into my place, if they’d seen my apartment. Maybe on the train ride home or at a bookstore, or after the movies. They didn’t give me an answer. Which makes sense: who besides me thinks about how the furniture fits in my apartment? Before I saw this auction I just thought I would never figure it out. I had lived reading chair-free for a long time and would continue to do so. I moved on with my life. Then sometime in January, mid-stream in the listing, a solution bloomed in my head: the Frattini chair has only one place it could work. If I moved my black and tan dresser to the wall where other stuff is, and throw out a cabinet I bought at Stormville, it would fit, and wouldn’t look bad either. But I don’t know. Without getting too into it, I have musical instruments by the wall where the dresser would go and, well, I can’t get rid of them. I can read on the couch, I think. I have for a while. How important’s a chair, really? It’s not that important. I’ll wait for a good one.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Other work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit