Decorated Pitcher by Aldo Tura, 1950s

Born in 1909, Italian designer-maker Aldo Tura established his furniture production house in Lombardy in 1939. Working between the idioms of Art Deco and modernism, Tura created singular, high-end furniture and accessories that were typified by rich materials, sculptural forms, and high-end, artisanal techniques. Tura’s work has become highly collectible, especially examples with exotic finishes— like eggshell, goatskin, and parchment—in intense palettes of red, green, and yellow.

Tura was one of the most unique design talents of the Italian midcentury. In the postwar years, as many furniture producers were adjusting their production methods toward mass production, Tura remained committed to slow, traditional hand craftsmanship. He favored intricate, complex forms and labor-intensive processes that could never by replicated in a large-scale factory system. As a result, the number of works by Tura available on the vintage market remains limited.

Today, Tura’s company continues to produce high-end, deco-esque furniture in Lombardy, but much information about Tura himself has been lost to history. The Brooklyn Museum in New York owns a handful of Tura designs that were originally exhibited in the 1950-53 traveling exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today.