Bookshelf

Charlotte Perriand was a rare female voice among the avant-garde designers whose designs shaped modern living in the early 20th century. As a student, she rejected the popular Beaux-Arts style and found inspiration instead in machine-age technology. She joined the studio of Le Corbusier at 24, where she experimented with steel, aluminum, and glass, developing a series of tubular steel chairs that remain a modern icon. In 1940, she traveled to Japan to advise the government on how to export products to the West, and spent WWII exiled in Vietnam, where she discovered local woodwork and weaving techniques and embraced natural materials. “The most important thing to realize is that what drives the modern movement is a spirit of enquiry; it’s a process of analysis and not a style,” she said near the end of her life. “We worked with ideals.” Literature: Mary McLeod, Charlotte Perriand : An art of living, New York, 2003, pp. 145-146 Jacques Barsac, Charlotte Perriand, Un art d'habiter 1903-1959, Paris, 2005, pp. 400, 403, 405, 417, 421 and 422 Steph Simon : Retrospective 1956-1974. Prouvé, Perriand, Mouille, Jouve, Noguchi, exh. cat., Galerie Downtown François Laffanour, February-March 2007, pp. 62-63 and 67 Charlotte Perriand L'aventure japonaise, exhibition catalogue, Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, February 22-May 26 2013, p. 176 Jacques Barsac, Charlotte Perriand, L'oeuvre complète, vol.3, Paris, 2017, pp. 24-25 and 56-57 Le monde nouveau de Charlotte Perriand, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2 October 2019-24 February 2020, p. 333