Table Wood (mahogany?), cast and gilded metal mounts, inlays of ivory or bone, metal, and mother-of-pearl. Tea and Coffee set Silver and ivory. Both designed by Carlo Bugatti, ca. 1910 Carlo Bugatti was born in Milan in 1856. By the late 1800s, he was a well-respected designer of furniture and silver, making the most of Italy's still- pre-industrial status to create refined works whose imaginative, organic design and meticulous execution played off the prevailing shoddiness and vulgarity of the industrialized decorative arts that characterized much Northern European production. Asymmetrical, curvilinear, and frequently decorated with stylized insect forms and motifs inspired by Islamic art, Bugatti's designs resonate with the turn-of-the-century art nouveau style, but they have never enjoyed as broad a popularity--perhaps because they are so unique and challenging. The museum's table and tea set exhibit a bewildering virtuosity of conception, design, and execution--bizarre, whimsical, frightening, elegant, and stunningly beautiful all at once. These works, from about 1910, may well represent the swan song of a man the museum's curator of Renaissance and Later Decorative Arts and Sculpture Henry Hawley describes as "one of the most inspired and original designers who devoted his talents to the decorative arts;" soon after, Bugatti retired to a town north of Paris, where he sank into obscurity and died on an unrecorded date in 1940. (His family remained prominent, however; one son, Ettore, gained fame as an automobile designer, and his other son Rembrandt made a name for himself as a sculptor.) Table: Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund, 1991.45 Coffee and tea set: The Thomas A. Fawick Memorial Collection 1980.74-78