UPCOMING AUCTIONS / GAZETTE DROUOT INTERNATIONAL Fornasetti, Ponti… 3 Piero Fornasetti's work is a huge theatre where reality windows and staircases with an interior lighting that dons the guise of fiction… Or it might be the opposite invites you to wander around them. It is now in the – you never know with this fellow. The only certainty is Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Sold by Art the artist's passion for drawing and line. Fornasetti Richelieu at Drouot, this is the second version of this began his career as an engraver. He founded the "Stam- sort of desk, from 1952. Around 20 copies of it were peria d'Arte Piero Fornasetti", and began publishing his produced in the Fifties and Sixties, and a further ten or own drawings and those of Carrá, De Chirico and so in the 1980s. This slant-front bureau in wood, Fontana. He discovered that he could transpose his covered with black and white lithographs of architec- work onto almost any support. Architect and designer ture, has an upper section with two doors opening Gio Ponti, also from Milan, who founded the review onto a metal hemicylindrical niche with hidden ligh- Domus in 1928, was struck by his scarves in the 1933 ting and glass shelves. The sloping lid reveals an Milan Triennale. Together, they designed a series of interior with pigeon holes and drawers, and the lower lamps, magazine covers, ceramics and furniture. part has three superimposed drawers. This is a thea- In 1951, they produced the "Trumó Architettura" trical world, with its deceptive architecture and hidden (trumó meaning credenza or sideboard): one of the doors designed to intrigue the viewer. A similar flagship pieces of their collaboration. Here the two example featured in Los Angeles in the 1998 sale of the colleagues, fascinated by architecture, from Ancient Fornasetti collection, consisting of 200 objects and Rome to Renaissance palaces, reproduced doors, items of furniture. Anne Foster 30.