Midcentury Modern

Business partners look back at how their events and the market have evolved since their fairs launched.

The workload of Lucy Ryder Richardson and Petra Curtis, founders of the MidCentury Modern Shows, is now so taken up with the property staging side of their business and other projects that they now focus solely on the fairs they run at Dulwich College.

Specialist event focuses on a popular period when ‘some truly original ideas’ developed

Sixty-plus years after it arrived, the modernity of Mid-century design and the volume of it on the market continues to appeal to both dealers and buyers.

The Midcentury Modern Shows team of Lucy Ryder Richardson and Petra Curtis are all grounded until next year.

A UK-based design studio trio last year took over the UK licence to the archive of Florence Broadhurst, an Australian designer whose whirlwind life came to a tragic end in 1977.

This distinctive poster with its saw-edged image was created by the Polish designer Mieczyslaw Wasilewski for Brian De Palma’s classic 1987 crime thriller 'The Untouchables'.

Mid-century style is very much on the rise at the moment – as the organisers of the two Midcentury Shows in London know well.

Launched in 2003, the one-day fairs remain a big draw for lovers of 20th century design.

Lamps in south London form a stylish and popular part of the mid-century collecting field.

“Mid-century is pretty unstoppable as the ‘new antique’ with exhibitions on Fifties and Sixties designers like Charles and Ray Eames and Harry Bertoia now regular events,” says Lucy Ryder Richardson, founder with Petra Curtis of the Midcentury Modern Shows.

This is Liza Minelli as you might never have seen her – in this Polish poster by Wiktor Górka for the film Kabaret, which was created in 1973 for the first year of the film’s release in Poland.