BUGATTI, Carlo

Italian designer, active also in France. His biography, based on the poorly documented family tradition, remains sketchy. His father, Giovanni Luigi Bugatti, was a decorative stone-carver. Carlo Bugatti registered at the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1875 and is said later to have been at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He painted and showed an interest in architecture, producing designs for buildings and elements of interior architecture at several points in his career, although no structures designed by him are recorded as having been executed. In 1880 he returned to Milan, where he lived for approximately 25 years.

The first clear visual evidence of Bugatti’s activities as a furniture designer and manufacturer is contained in some illustrations related to the display of his work at the Italian Exhibition at Earl’s Court, London, in 1888.

Bugatti’s furniture is self-consciously original in design, though sources for its style can be found in the Islamic and Japanese decorative traditions and Romanesque architecture. Elaborate fringes and tassels often decorate his pieces. Circles, round arches and, later, curving planes are usually encountered in his furniture designs. Once his formal vocabulary was established, Bugatti produced a varied series of works using a limited number of motifs. A stylistic progression is observable in his designs towards unified, plastic forms, but the precise chronology of this development is not clear, and it seems that early designs continued to be manufactured over a long period.

About 1904, Bugatti and his family moved to Paris. He sold his Milanese furniture-making shop, but Italian firms made furniture after his designs or in his style for some years after his departure.

In France, he turned his attention primarily to designing silver pieces, often incorporating fantastic human and animal forms. Some furniture designed by Bugatti was produced in France but probably not in large quantity. He also made plaster models for interior architectural schemes, but they seem not to have been realized. After 1910 he seems to have lived essentially in retirement in Pierrefonds, Oise, occasionally painting, but virtually ceasing his design activities. In 1937 he moved to Molsheim, Alsace, to be near his son Ettore.

Carlo Bugatti’s sons achieved illustrious careers of their own. Rembrandt Bugatti (1884-1916) became a sculptor, and Ettore Bugatti (1881-1947) manufactured luxurious automobiles and racing cars.