Color Me Fornasetti

In his Milan studio, Italian designer Piero Fornasetti produced the most-breathtaking wastepaper bins of this century. His fertile imagination spun trash cans emblazoned with bugle-toting hussars, bursts of butterflies, overturned top hats, swooning Grecian youths and antique pistols. No household object escaped Fornasetti’s reveries: toilet bowls and bidets blossoming with wildflowers, chandeliers fashioned from seashells, 12 dinner plates that, when placed in proper arrangement, depicted a life-size Eve resting the as-yet-unbitten apple against her thigh.

On Saturday, Christie’s Los Angeles will auction a half-dozen Fornasetti wastepaper bins, along with the master’s marmalade jars, silk-screened bicycles, Venetian blinds, silk scarves, hand-painted umbrella stands, brass-and-glass mirrors and duck-shaped soup tureens. Given the recent frenzy for all things Fornasetti, Christie’s expects wastebasket bidding to begin at a vigorous $500, Venetian blinds at $2,000, and that humble seashell chandelier to fetch as much as $12,000.

“Design should be the production of objects of high quality and low cost,” Fornasetti told an interviewer in 1987, the year before his death. “However, the situation is reversed and it has become, yes, good drawing, most often, but at a high price. For an elite. And this is wrong.”