The art of living
A new exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton celebrates Charlotte Perriand, the trailblazing designer and architect whose aesthetic vision forever changed our everyday experience
Rising up from the verdant heart of the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne, the Fondation Louis Vuitton appears from afar like a giant vessel, its curved glass sails rippling gently in the breeze. The landmark building, which opened in 2014 as the result of a collaboration between the LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault and the internationally renowned architect Frank Gehry, stands as a majestic embodiment of the shared landscape between disciplines – art and architecture, design and engineering – all underpinned by the power of philanthropy.
What better setting, then, for an exhibition celebrating Charlotte Perriand, whose work blurred the lines between the creative sectors to define a new model of living, her so-called art de vivre? Two decades after Perriand’s death, the display will take visitors on a journey through the 20th century that reveals the forwardthinking outlook of a woman who saw design as a practical and positive force for social progress. Many of the architectural conventions that we now take for granted can be traced back to Perriand’s pioneering vision: the concept of open-plan living, for instance, is rooted in her conviction that a mother should not be locked away in a separate kitchen while cooking for her family. ‘She had a very modern spirit – free, courageous, independent, curious,’ says Suzanne Pagé, the Fondation’s artistic director. ‘I admire her humanist outlook, the fact that she opened herself up to different cultures and cared about the environment.’
Created in collaboration with Perriand’s daughter, Pernette – herself an architect and the devoted guardian of her mother’s legacy – the show doubles as a biography of a groundbreaking individual and a wider historical record of an evolving society. Chronologically arranged, it begins in 1927 with the young Perriand’s first major exhibition, held at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, where she presented her seminal chrome and aluminium bar. Its bold design and shiny, metallic surfaces – a clear departure from the softer, highly patterned styles Perriand had studied at the School of Decorative Arts – were enough to convince an initially reluctant Le Corbusier to take her on at his atelier. (His earlier patronising rebuff to her request for work, ‘We don’t embroider cushions here’, has been adopted by feminist historians as shorthand for the uphill
battle that faced 20th-century women artists and architects trying to make a name for themselves.)
The time Perriand spent collaborating with Le Corbusier and his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, was formative in shaping her image of the ideal modern apartment, furnished with the signature tubular metal furniture they designed together. Yet despite her early enthusiastic embrace of the machine age, she gradually distanced herself from Le Corbusier’s puritanism in favour of an aesthetic that was more deeply rooted in nature, partly inspired by the time she spent in France’s rural Savoie region. A lifelong lover of the outdoors, she began introducing organic shapes into her free-form designs, rediscovering an affection for natural woods. Her wartime travels to Japan, where she had accepted a government commission to advise the country on industrial arts, further shaped her evolution of a set of creative principles based around finding beauty in space and minimalism. The 1955 exhibition she organised in Tokyo, towards the end of her second Japanese sojourn, brought together architectural elements with sculptures, tapestries, furniture and paintings (including those created by her friend and associate Fernand Léger) to propose a synthesis between art forms that, in Perriand’s eyes, offered the key to a more harmonious way of living.
Though lofty in her ideals, Perriand was a pragmatist at heart. ‘Intellectualism may be all very well, but if it sets up barriers between conception and realisation, it cannot be the way forward,’ she once said. Ever since being confronted by the low standard of housing in the French capital in the 1930s (‘la grande misère de Paris’, as she put it), she had become politically invested in the idea of creating better-quality, affordable homes for all social classes. Hence the appeal of prefabrication, with which she was finally able to experiment in the late 1960s, thanks to a commission at the Savoie ski resort of Les Arcs. Here, she constructed a series of buildings that appeared to blend seamlessly into the slopes, offering high-quality mass accommodation that allowed residents to contemplate the landscape in which Perriand herself saw so much wonder.
In attempting to unite her affinity with the natural world with her desire to exploit the potential of cutting-edge materials and technologies, Perriand anticipated many of the challenges we face in modern life. ‘We have been overtaken by the evolution of the machine but, as yet, we have not devised ways of dealing with the changes taking place,’ she said in 1984 – a statement that still rings true today. Jean-Paul Claverie, the art advisor to Bernard Arnault and one of the driving forces behind the new exhibition, notes that Perriand was extraordinarily prescient in her realisation that, as a society, we would eventually tire of the inexorable march of modernity. ‘She taught us that freedom is the most precious thing we can have in our everyday lives, that true luxury is having space, light and nature around us,’ he says. Hers is a lesson well worth learning. ‘Charlotte Perriand’ is at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (www.fondation louisvuitton.fr) until 24 February 2020.