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Mid-Century Aldo Tura Lily Pad Bronze Scalloped Floor Lamp, Original Shade

About the Item

An exceedingly rare, possibly one-of-a-kind Aldo Tura bronze lily pad floor lamp, base signed. Dimensions: 72.5" x 12". Born in 1909, Italian designer-maker Aldo Tura established his furniture production house in Lombardy in 1939. Working between the idioms of Art Deco and modernism, Tura created singular, high-end furniture and accessories that were typified by rich materials, sculptural forms, and high-end, artisanal techniques. Tura’s work has become highly collectible, especially examples with exotic finishes, like eggshell, goatskin, and parchment, in intense palettes of red, green, and yellow. Tura was one of the most unique design talents of the Italian midcentury. In the postwar years, as many furniture producers were adjusting their production methods toward mass production, Tura remained committed to slow, traditional hand craftsmanship. He favored intricate, complex forms and labor-intensive processes that could never by replicated in a large scale factory system. As a result, the number of works by Tura available on the vintage market remains limited. Today, Tura’s company continues to produce high-end, deco-esque furniture in Lombardy, but much information about Tura himself has been lost to history. The Brooklyn Museum in New York owns a handful of Tura designs that were originally exhibited in the 1950-53 traveling exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today.

Creator:

Aldo Tura (Designer)

Dimensions:

Height: 72.5 in (184.15 cm)Diameter: 12 in (30.48 cm)

Power Source:

Plug-in

Lampshade:

Included

Style:

Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Brass,Bronze

Place of Origin:

Italy

Period:

Mid-20th Century

Date of Manufacture:

circa 1950

Condition:

Wear consistent with age and use. Minor losses. Minor structural damages. Minor fading. Gorgeous patina. Signs of age and wear. Some dents and imperfections to shade. Oxidation and wear to base. Will need to be rewired.

Seller Location:

Brooklyn, NY

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU4190312894712

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Shop All Aldo Tura

Aldo Tura

One of the most enigmatic and polarizing figures to emerge in Italian design, Aldo Tura is an outlier in the world of mid-century furniture. The designer’s glamorous bar carts, coffee tables, cabinets and more resist categorization and draw inspiration from Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Baroque, Surrealist and modernist styles.

Tura moved through distinct phases in his career in terms of aesthetics, influences and finishes, rendering his life’s work exciting and diverse. Despite these phases, he held a singular devotion to one material: lacquered goatskin. Tura established a furniture production house in 1939 in Lombardy, and some of his early work focused on tables, decorative lamps and more. He later expanded to bar furnishings like rolling carts, cabinets and complementary barware accessories like ice buckets and cocktail shakers. The eccentric, gleaming and luxe surface of lacquered goatskin was a constant, along with eggshell, parchment and leather.

By the 1950s, Tura had begun to use hand-painted figural panels on the surface of cabinets, serveware (such as carafes) and other pieces. He even replicated famous works by artists like Monet and Bruegel the Elder and art from the Middle Ages, sometimes playfully embedding the paintings on cabinets shaped like oversize books. Even though he had a favored color palette of rich chocolate browns and deep emeralds, his style remained consistently hard to define.

Tura was unlike most of his Italian contemporaries but held a similar reverence for the nation’s traditional craftsmanship and artisanal techniques. He never followed the growing trend of mass-produced, industrial furniture and stuck to creating small, meticulously handcrafted collections. This principled choice means that today, a Tura piece is a rare and highly coveted collectible. The Tura firm continues to operate in Brianza, promoting Italian craftsmanship and the eclectic materials embraced by their namesake designer.

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