JEAN-MICHEL FRANK
The designer made a name for himself with his subtle and minimalist take on furniture that embodied easy sophistication. By Jason Mowen
The designer made a name for himself with his subtle and minimalist take on furniture that embodied easy sophistication
In 1926, Jean-Michel Frank created a suite of rooms for society duo Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles on the first floor of their hôtel particulier on Place des Etats-Unis in Paris. At its heart was a smoking room where walls were covered in large squares of glazed parchment, the fireplace surround clad in mica and Frank’s signature club sofas and armchairs placed in a somewhat Spartan formation around the room with other pieces in bronze and straw marquetry.
It proved to be a subtle yet seminal moment in the history of modern design. Not only had Frank broken fresh ground with his pared-back take on a grand Parisian salon, he had established a new design vocabulary. Whereas the words ‘simplicity’ and ‘luxury’ may seem ubiquitous in their pairing today, they were a complete contradiction in terms back then.
Frank’s aesthetic fell acutely out of favour in the post-war years. From the late 1960s onwards though, ‘le style Frank’ served as the inspiration behind some of the greatest interiors of recent history. The rue de Babylone home of Yves Saint
Laurent and Pierre Bergé, regular guests of the Noailles, is a superb example.
Who knows what could have happened had Frank lived longer. Cecil Beaton wrote that his friend “might have become the greatest designer of the future” in his 1954 book The Glass of Fashion. “He would have been… chosen to decorate the United Nations building.” Like the majority of his interior commissions, the Noailles’ smoking room no longer exists and we must rely on photos, taken at the time by Man Ray, to appreciate its sparse beauty. What has survived, though, is an extensive catalogue of furniture, objects and lighting from the 1920s and ’30s, Luxurious material finishes such as obsidian ››
‹‹ and shagreen were aligned alongside the more humble. Terracotta was formed into lamps, canvas covered sofas and straw marquetry — not championed since the 18th century — was used to clad entire rooms, as in Frank’s own apartment on rue de Verneuil.
Much like his Art Deco brethren, Frank referenced the past as much as the future. But his lightness of step in shifting from the neoclassicism of Louis XVI to ancient China, pharaonic Egypt, Japanese minimalism — or even just pure geometry — was without parallel. That’s not to say he did it all on his own.
Artistic collaborations were core to Frank’s oeuvre; the wonderfully primitive lighting he produced with
Alberto Giacometti, and an ongoing partnership with cabinetmaker
Adolphe Chanaux. It was with
Chanaux that Frank opened his eponymously named boutique on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1932.
Despite today’s almost universal love of all things Frank, there remains an esoteric air to both the man and his work. Born into a Franco-German Jewish family in 1895, tragedy was to cast a long shadow across his life. His two older brothers were killed in the early days of World War I and his parents died soon after. The small fortune he inherited, though, allowed him to move freely within the avant-garde circles of Paris high society. Chilean-born art patron and tastemaker Eugenia Errázuriz mentored the young Frank, cultivating his passion for minimal interiors — a seed that would blossom into the “strange luxury of nothingness,” a term coined by client-to-be François Mauriac. A list of his friends, collaborators and clients — there was a lot of overlap — reads like a who’s who of everything we imagine Paris to have been in the ’20s, from Nancy Cunard and Horst P Horst to Elsa Schiaparelli and Lucien Lelong.
America also succumbed to Frank’s charms. The San Francisco penthouse of railroad magnate Charles Templeton Crocker was his first commission across the pond — an almost futuristic bachelor pad that Vogue described in 1929 as “perhaps the most beautiful apartment in the world”. Then came the New York apartment of Nelson Rockefeller in 1937, an exuberant departure from the designer’s usual off-white-on-off-white palette. A heavily patterned carpet designed by long-time collaborator and friend Christian Bérard and gilded consoles by Giacometti hold court alongside magnificent paintings by Matisse, Léger and Picasso.
He completed the sumptuous residence of Jorge and Matilde Born in Buenos Aires in 1939, one of the largest and most important commissions of his career. He then fled to Argentina as Europe collapsed into war — Frank was both gay and Jewish — and then to New York where he took his own life in March 1941. His legacy, however, is only one of beauty, both primordial and of a future that has already come to pass. If we take only one thing from Jean-Michel Frank, let it be his words: “A single object can furnish a room, so long as it is beautiful.” Jean-Michel Frank by Laure Verchère is available now; assouline.com
“A single object can furnish a room, so long as it is beautiful ”