Mid-century floor lamp from the prestigious Spanish company Metalarte. Design similar to the lamp for Lumi by Oscar Torlasco. 1950s.
Brass foot and walnut body.
It consists of three E 27 lamp holders, two on the sides and one facing up.
Oscar Torlasco was born in Rome, Italy, in 1934. Torlasco designed many beautiful lamps. The most well known are the lamps he designed for Lumi. He designed for several Italian lighting manufacturers, including Esperia, Stilux, Lamperti and Stilkronen. Most of his designs are from the 1950s and 60s
After the Civil War, Metall Arts had to Spanishize its name. This is how Metal Artes was born, which, under the direction of Antonio Riera, went from working exclusively to order to producing and marketing its own models of door handles, household items and stylish lamps. The first one they manufactured was dated 1942. They called it, logically, No. 1, because at that time a lamp was not yet understood as a design, nor did it have its own name. Then Spain was a solar and the world was at war. Then came the postwar. It was not until the mid-fifties when Antonio Riera began to travel to the Nordic countries attracted by the siren songs of the flourishing Scandinavian design. There he was inspired for the new collections that Metal Artes brought to the market between 1954 and 1960, illustrated in a first catalog of hand-colored photographs.
They were successful. They were years of prosperity. The company was consolidated and began to be a benchmark in the lighting sector. The old workshop, located in the center of Barcelona, is too small for them and they plan to build a factory in the neighboring town of Sant Joan Despí. In 1965 they inaugurated their own building of 7,000 square meters where nothing was missing, there was space for manufacturing, administrative and commercial units, and a large showroom. They also launch a new name for the company, which is now called Metalarte, and a corporate image, something that is common today but which in those days sounded exotic. Antonio Riera wanted to lead his company along the path of the future and even then he knew how to see that he had to take the path of design. The graphic also counted and the first Metalarte logo was commissioned by Josep Baqués (years later Josep Maria Trias redesigned it).
Until then, the lamps produced by Metal Artes did not have a recognized author because they had not yet been signed. They weren't bad at all. It is enough to take a look, for example, at the models dated in the years 1959 and 1962, to realize that they have an uncanny resemblance to some designs that are currently on the windows of other companies. Inspirations are always back and forth. Today we look for them in the past and then, when this country woke up, businessmen found them in Europe, in particular in Italy. Antonio Riera went a little further, to the United States. More than inspiration, he was looking for inspired people, and in New York he met George W. Hansen, an American of Danish origin who, while waging war on the island of Labrador, designed a lamp that would later become the famous Swing Arm.
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