Charlotte Perriand

Born in 1903, Charlotte Perriand was admitted to the École de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in 1920. After taking part in the 1925 Exposition and the 1926 Salon des Arts Décoratifs, she broke entirely with conventional aesthetics the following year by presenting her “Bar sous le toit” — a rooftop bar—made of chromed steel and anodised aluminium. The success was immediate, and her path became clear: she joined the studio of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret.

From this point on, her career became inseparable from the Modern Movement, and in 1929 she played an active role in founding the Union des Artistes Modernes. Less formalist than the members of the Bauhaus, she brought a more human dimension to her designs through her fluid use of materials and her incorporation of stone blocks, pebbles, or tree branches, whose beauty, to her, embodied an organic as much as a functional truth.

A mission in Japan allowed her to test and expand her ideas: connection with nature, standardisation of components, integration of built-in elements, and furniture reduced to the essential. Trained in the modern school, enriched by a privileged relationship with nature, and confirmed in her convictions by her time in Japan, Charlotte Perriand developed after the war a style that is pure, powerful, and profoundly humanist.

Patrick Favardin, Le Style 50 — Un moment de l’art français, Éditions Sous Le Vent, Paris, 1987.
Texts by Guillemette Delaporte and Gérard Xuriguera.