Casa Malaparte, designed by Adalberto Libera in the 1930s for Curzio Malaparte, writer and architect manqué 

Inside Casa Malaparte: Capri’s house of paradoxes

The villa, a cocktail of the real and the imagined, is the subject of a new exhibition

Edwin Heathcote

 

JUNE 26 2020

Casa Malaparte on the Italian island of Capri was a house conceived in lockdown. Built in the late 1930s, its first occupant, Curzio Malaparte — an Italian-German poet, novelist, war correspondent, editor, fascist, communist and finally Maoist — had turned himself into an architect during time spent in exile. But only in his head. 

An enthusiastic early supporter of the fascists and a participant in Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, the volatile, attention-seeking Malaparte fell out with Il Duce and the notorious blackshirt and aviator Italo Balbo. 

In 1933, he found himself briefly imprisoned, then confined to house arrest on the Aeolian island of Lipari, off the coast of Sicily. He would later exaggerate his arrest and imprisonment but, as fascist punishments go, it seems to have been cushy.

Malaparte was an “architect manqué” — an enthusiastic amateur. At the apex of Lipari is a stone fort, a powerful presence towering over the bay. Perhaps some of its charisma leaked into Malaparte’s mind when, in 1937, he found his own site on Capri on which to build a house, on another rocky promontory of awesome beauty. 

Now, Casa Malaparte and its striking, strange and monumental furniture designed by Curzio is revisited in an exhibition at the Gagosian gallery on London’s Davies Street — among the first to reopen in the UK capital after lockdown. The exhibition features limited editions of the original pieces of furniture, made in collaboration with Malaparte’s descendants.

The 'strange and monumental' furniture designed by Curzio Malaparte for his house; reproductions are on show at the Gagosian gallery, London
Photo by Dariusz Jasak

The house on Capri was designed by Adalberto Libera, a talented and intriguing architect hired by Malaparte, who had attempted to combine Modernism with a fascist sensibility, imbued with the ghosts of classical archetypes. (Malaparte’s connections in the Fascist party granted him permission to build the house.) 

Libera designed a house for Malaparte, much of which was built. It is still there, a private home owned by Malaparte’s descendants. 

But Malaparte, ever the dabbler, departed from the plans, adding its most distinctive features: the roof that takes the form of a stair and looks like a Greek theatre set into the landscape; a broad terrace and the red colour reminiscent of the Roman interiors of nearby Pompeii. And finally, a suite of furniture.

That furniture — a set of dining table, bench and console — forms the basis of the Gagosian exhibition. The small gallery is populated by reproductions of the trio of pieces in stone and wood, placed against a background of the mocked-up window of the Casa Malaparte — its most distinctive and seductive internal feature.

A window at Casa Malaparte is framed like a painting in dark wood to display the sea views 
Photo by Dariusz Jasak

The pieces are made of walnut, pine and Carrara marble
Photo by Dariusz Jasak

There are also a couple of vitrines of Malaparte’s books and magazines, and a few hideous pastel-shaded pieces of overwrought Meissen porcelain, which must have looked strange in the house’s austere interior. 

Libera was a rationalist: a Modernist who stripped forms down to their essence. His client was not.

Malaparte brought a more poetic, mysterious sensibility to the house. In his professional life he was known for brutal, unsparing war reportage that blended truth and fantasy; neither fiction nor non-fiction but something suspiciously in-between.

He brought some of that fantasy to his conception of the house, a cocktail of the real and the imagined. He had promoted the work of the Surrealists in his magazine Prospettiva, and the same eerie sense of the uncanny pervades the house. Perhaps it is the heartbreaking beauty of the setting, the intensity of the blue of the sea and the architectural quality of the rocks.

Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli in 

Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’, partly filmed 

at Casa Malaparte

Or perhaps it is defiance of the local architectural tradition of small openings with shutters that block out the searing sun. The living-room window is framed like a painting in dark wood, which transforms the room into a gallery in which the exhibit is a picture of the sublime sea. 

Despite Malaparte’s many changes to Libera’s design, the window is in the architect’s earliest sketches, made before he had even visited the site. It is counterbalanced by another moment of architectural theatre: a hearth in which the flames are viewed against a small opening to the ocean, where the elements come dramatically together. 

In 1980, Domus magazine — which was once the international platform for Italian fascist-rationalist architecture — carried an article by the architect John Hejduk, himself a designer of enigmatic buildings. 

He wrote: “Libera’s Malaparte house is private. It is a house of paradoxes. It is an object which consumes. It is filled with unrequited histories. It is a relic left upon the pinnacle after the seas have subsided. It is a sarcophagus of soft cries. It whispers of inevitable fates.” Hejduk’s picture of a paradoxical place is spot on: Casa Malaparte is simultaneously mythical and resolutely modern.

Curzio Malaparte brought a more poetic, mysterious sensibility 

to the rationalist/Modernist house

The house’s window and hearth have attracted most attention. But the rest of the main living space is austere, almost bare. It is relieved only by those three pieces of furniture. Just as the window reconciles art, architecture and landscape, the hearth celebrates the elements outside. The furniture introduces antiquity and nature, the fragment and the tree, into the interior. 

The two tables’ base consists solely of two sections each of classical, fluted column. In the originals in Malaparte’s house these were found fragments, the cut stone that the Romans left strewn across Italy and that was mined for architectural elements in the centuries since the empire’s demise. They are the same fragments that haunt the landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings. 

The table tops are cross-sections of tree trunks, retaining the form of the tree in their uneven edges, the rustic set against the perfection of the classical. The long dining table is different: its legs are lumps of timber chiselled into Rococo-style barley twists.

These are the pieces seen in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Mépris (“Contempt”, 1963), set on Capri and filmed partly at Casa Malaparte, in which Brigitte Bardot floats decoratively around the house while American producer Jack Palance and playwright Michel Piccoli discuss remaking The Odyssey against this mythical landscape. 

Should you look the clip up, however, your eye may be distracted by vivid-blue armchairs, which are oddly anachronistic. 

 The history of modern furniture is full of chairs and tables designed for particular houses. But the furniture on display at the Gagosian is different. Unlike contemporaneous tubular steel pieces or welded, chrome-plated loungers, these tables and chairs were never designed to look mass-produced, universal or at home anywhere. They were never designed to appear modern. 

Instead, they try to reconcile fragments of lost history, the juxtaposition of artifice and nature and the impossibility of their separation. Perhaps the motifs are universal. But if you were to invest in a piece of your own, you may need a bigger and more beautiful house.

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