Charlotte Perriand - The Collection of Halsey Minor New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Prouvé Family, Nancy, France; Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris; Steven Volpe Design, San Francisco, California

  • Literature

    Charlotte Perriand and Fernand Leger, Charlotte Perriand, Fernand Leger, une connivence, Biot, 1999, pg. 59; Jacques Barsac, Charlotte Perriand-Un Art d'Habiter, Paris, 2005, pp. 420-425 for similar examples

  • Catalogue Essay

    Although never a couple, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé stood hand-in-hand at midcentury, the pragmatic parents of postwar modernism in France. Together they devised economic solutions to the problems of daily life in everyday places: dormitories, locker rooms, apartments, offices. Their unadorned furniture, built from wood, aluminum, and bent sheet steel, never sacrificed clarity for decoration, “but its construction is so powerful that it imposes itself in space like sculpture,” as fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa observed of Prouvé’s work. (Laurence Bergerot, Patrick Seguin, Jean Prouvé, Paris, 2007, vol. 1, p. 23)
     
    Longtime friends, the two designers formalized their relationship in 1952 at the behest of gallerist Steph Simon. That year and the next, they collaborated on furniture—bookshelves, tables, beds—for the student bedrooms of the Maison de la Tunisie and Maison du Mexique at Cité Universitaire, Paris. In both residences, each room was dominated by a large bookcase whose wide plank shelves were joined by staggered aluminium casiers, or ‘pigeonholes,’ fashioned from bent aluminum.
     
    The present “Bibliothèque murale” owes its design to those previous examples and to an earlier bookcase, with wood blocks in place of aluminum ones, designed by Perriand in 1940 and later produced for L’Équipment de la Maison. “Are we going to have mass or void?” asked Perriand in her autobiography Une Vie de Création (The Monacelli Press, New York, 2003). With its energetic interplay of forms in space, “Bibliothèque murale” achieves both.

  • Artist Biography

    Charlotte Perriand

    French • 1903 - 1999

    Trailblazer Charlotte Perriand burst onto the French design scene in her early 20s, seemingly undeterred by obstacles in an era when even the progressive Bauhaus school of design barred women from architecture and furniture design courses. She studied under Maurice Dufrêne at the École de l'Union Centrale des art Décoratifs, entering into a competition at the 1925 Expo des Arts Décoratifs by age 22 and gaining critical acclaim for her exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in 1927.

    On the heels of this success, that same year she joined the Paris design studio of Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. For ten years the three collaborated on "equipment for living," such as the iconic tubular steel B306 Chaise Longue (1928). After World War II, Perriand joined forces with Jean Prouvé to create modernist furniture that combined the precise lines of Prouvé's bent steel with the soft, round edges and warmth of natural wood.

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9

Important “Bibliotheque Murale,”

ca. 1958
Oak, bent aluminum.
52 1/4 x 126 x 12 1/2 in. (132.7 x 320 x 31.8 cm).
Produced by Les Ateliers Jean Prouvé for Galerie Steph Simon, France.

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $314,500

The Collection of Halsey Minor

13 May 2010
New York