part of the article – full article here

http://howtospendit.ft.com/furniture/48403-fine-artist-led-furniture

FEBRUARY 21 2014
EMMA CRICHTON-MILLER

In September last year, some unusual items of furniture appeared in the windows of the flagship headquarters of The Conran Shop in London. Severely rectilinear, beautifully tooled and made in a variety of exotic woods, these unarguably functional desks (from £21,000), stools and chairs (both from £2,200) carried not just the allure of their own rigour, but also the association with their designer, the renowned American sculptor Donald Judd. Since Judd created the first prototypes in the 1970s and 1980s, these pieces have continued to be manufactured on a one-off basis, through the Judd Foundation, in collaboration with selected craftsmen. This was the first time, however, that the furniture has been publicly sold in Britain, with all 20 of Judd’s original designs available to order through the store. The initiative, a joint venture between the foundation and The Conran Shop, reflects a growing interest in furniture made by artists – and an awareness, in our design-conscious age, that classics in the genre are likely to prove a valuable asset.

The business is not, however, a straightforward one. There is suspicion on both sides – from design galleries concerned that artists will have no respect for practicalities, and from artists, who worry that the constraints of creating objects for use will dilute their vision. For Judd, however, his philosophy was very clear. In 1993, the year before he died, he wrote an essay entitled It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp, exploring his occasional forays into this line of work from the 1960s onwards – driven, as he was, mostly by necessity. There he wrote, “The configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. The intent of art is different from that of the latter, which must be functional. If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous… The art in art is partly the assertion of someone’s interest, regardless of other considerations.” At the same time, there was no denying that his functional creations were the product of the same sensibility as his iconic, machine-tooled stacks and boxes. For Jasper Conran, chairman of The Conran Shop, it was this distinctive character that he felt his customers would respond to, even at prices that range from £2,200 for a chair to £25,000 for a single bed. “This particular aesthetic is very pertinent to the here and now,” he says. “There is a purity.”