The present two high-backed chairs belonged to a famed suite of furniture commissioned circa 1935 by perfume executive Jean-Pierre Guerlain (1905-1996) from designer Jean-Michel Frank, then the rage in Paris. Although no “nose” (it was his uncle Jacques who composed Shalimar, Mitsouko, and Vol de Nuit), the younger Guerlain was for a half century the family firm’s managerial stalwart, rising to chief executive in 1970. Shortly after he joined the company as associate director in 1933, he commissioned Frank to design a new apartment on the avenue Hoche during a period concurrent with Frank’s decoration of the Guerlain shop on place Vêndome.

Noted for its modish emptiness, Guerlain’s apartment was enlivened by muscular tenants: a Flemish tapestry; a shell-form plaster floor lamp gadrooned by Alberto Giacometti; and a selection of works by Frank including a long set of twelve side chairs (among them the present two) in a restrained Louis XVI style—no laurel leaf, no wreath. Frank pulled up the chairs to an imposing refectory table which he had fashioned from a severe slab of oak and thick bracket legs; in its cartoon billows, the table seemed to devour a repast of periods past and future, from Renaissance roast to postmodern pudding. Frank was nothing if not a voracious epicure of influences. In their referential restraint, these two chairs are a prime example of his reaction against the frivolity of Art Deco through his deft updating of past styles in service to his own brand of modernism, much as the neoclassicism of Louis XVI meant to straighten rococo curves.