In Perfect Harmony:Charlotte Perriand @ the Design Museum.

"Adaptation has to be ongoing – we have to know and accept this. These are transient times" - Charlotte Perriand

I had never heard of Charlotte Perriand before London's Design Museum hosted a retrospective of her life and career this summer. Considering she used to knock about with both Picasso and Le Corbusier that's something of a surprise, an oversight even.

 

Pierre Jeanerret - Charlotte Perriand on the beach (c.1935)

 

It's a situation I'm glad I've, with the help of the Design Museum, remedied but it's not one I'll beat myself up too much about. I'd not heard of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Natalia Goncharova, or Celia Paul until recent years either. If only I could work out what these artists and designers all have in common.

 

Female creatives, with a few key exceptions like Frida Kahlo and Bridget Riley, have long been sidelined, ignored, or turned into muses and it's been a pleasure and a joy in recent years to see so many shows curated from a female perspective and highlighting female artists that had been previously been airbrushed out of history. This was just one of many. It wasn't the best. But it was pretty good.

The Design Museum (in Perriand's first London show in two and a half decades) make the claim, and I am not qualified to disagree, that Perriand was "one of the great designers of the twentieth century" and that "her harmonious approach to modern interiors remains influential" (certainly some of it would look very nice in one of the squillions of new luxury apartments that are taking over London).

Dining room in the Place Saint-Sulpice apartment-studio, Paris (1927)

Born in 1903, by her early twenties she had already caught the attention of Le Corbusier and soon joined his studio. She developed the steel tube furniture pieces that, for decades, bore his name alone. The furniture design of her early years became a byword, or perhaps the last word, for/in modernism but Perriand's love of nature never left her and we see, as we pass through this exhibition, how her style was fused by combining modernism with more natural materials and artefacts.

On the surface, contrasting approaches. But Perriand was all about resolving such dichotomies and divergences. Craftsmanship collides with industrial production, East meets West, and urban melds with rural in her design process. Even the scale of her work, which could go from a stool to a ski resort, can be pitched at extremes.

Ultimately, she wanted to make functional and beautiful design that was available (and affordable even, maybe?) to all. The Place Saint-Sulpice apartment-studio in Paris for Perriand and her first husband (an Englishman by the name of Percy Scholefield) was light, airy, open plan, used mirrors to give the illusion of even more space, and had a bar under its roof.

It is reported that the bar was what most impresed Le Corbusier but others were more taken by her ball-bearing necklace. Perriand was inspired by both the clarity of industrial design but also by a painting, one year earlier, by Fernand Leger. By wearing these ball bearings around her neck Perriand was sending out a statement.

Ball-bearing necklace (1927)

Fernand Leger - Nature morte, le mouvement a billes (1926)

The statement was that she was modern and she was efficient. In relation to the stainless steel she employed in her chairs, she was quoted as saying that "metal plays the same part in furniture as cement has done in architecture. It is a revolution". It fitted with Le Corbusier's idea of the house as a "machine for living".

Peugeot, then best known for bicycle manufacture, were experts in tubular steel but they were not persuaded by Perriand's suggestion they collaborate. While Peugeot were dismissive of the idea, others were downright hostile to it. The British writer, and member of the Design & Industries Association, John Gloag, violently attacked the use of metal in furniture in the magazine The Studio!

It wasn't to dissuade Perriand, and I suggest it merely added grist to her mill. With Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Perriand next presented the world with what would go on to become one of her most celebrated designs. The chaise longue basculante (or, in English, the adjusting reclining chair). It wasn't the first reclining chair, far from it, but it was seen as a benchmark in that it provided elegance as surely as it did comfort.

Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand - Chaise longue basculante (1928)

Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand - Prototype for the Fauteuil grand confort (1928)

Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand - Siege a dossier basculant (1928)

I wouldn't have minded a lay down on it (or even a sit on one of her other chairs, some were free for visitors to try out but they were taken). She made big comfy leather chairs that would probably leave the imprint of your bum on them for several hours after you've got up (one is literally called the 'very comfortable armchair') and she made more aerodynamic, and easily transportable, chairs for occasions, presumably, when you didn't want to fall asleep.

Soon, with Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, she was making more rooms full of chrome and glass. A design that could be dismissed as a cliche these days and is often tossed off with little attention to detail and little care for making the place feel comfortable but these appear to be made with more thought and care than that. I could easily see myself sleeping very well in their Salon d'Automne room from 1929.

Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand - Un equipement interieur d'une habitation at the Salon d'Automne (1929)

In a letter to Pierre Jeanneret, who became a lifelong friend of Perriand, she shared her belief that architecture was, and is, a fundamentally social discipline. That is was work in the service of humanity.

Perriand and Jeanneret would go on long walks in the forest or on the beach. There they'd photograph found objects like pebbles, pieces of wood, and even old shoes (some were on show at the Design Museum) and these would inform her design. Later on in her career, she would collaborate with Jeanneret on projects as ambitious as mountain refuges and the two of them would combine with Le Corbusier to work on one of his most famous works:- Marseille's Unite d'Habitation.

Natural objects found by Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret (c.1932)

 Model of apartment kitchen in Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation, Marseille (1949)

Siege pliant et empilable (1936)

Villa Martinez, Buenos Aires, perspective drawing of the terrace (1930)

But in the thirties this growing interest in the organic and in the natural world saw her turn away from the machine aesthetic. The sensual qualities of wood saw her embark on a series of designs for free form wooden tables and when, during World War II, Perriand spent two years in Japan (where she'd been invited by the government to advise on how designers in that country could modernise their traditional craft), she immersed herself in the culture there.

In Japan she observed, and indeed admired, the sense of 'ordered emptiness' she found. It would remain with her on her return to Europe and when, in 1955, she staged an exhibition, Proposal for a Synthesis of the Arts, it became something of a manifesto that demonstrated her belief in fusion. Industrial metal shelving was displayed alongside crafted wooden furniture and modern paintings by friends like Leger and other sympathetic artists like Picasso and Joan Miro.

Raw tree-trunk coffee table (1940)

Pablo Picasso - The Dream and Lie of Franco, plate 1 (1937)

Fernand Leger - Tire-bouchon (1933)

Joan Miro - Aidez l'Espagne (1937)

Charlotte Perriand, Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso - Manifesto coffee table (1937)

"Wood" she explained "was made for caresssing" and could be as "soft as a woman's thighs"! The machine age had become tainted by ndustrial scale warfare, the rise of fascism, and the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War (and as we all know, the situation was only to deteriorate). 

Perriand's furniture designs didn't just seek comfort for one person but aimed to bring people together, quite literally, around the table. The six sided pine table she made for her studio in Montparnasse intentionally allowed more guests to be seated at it than a more traditional rectangular design and even the lesser number of table legs allowed more knee space.

Comfort, clearly, remained a consideration. Perriand was pretty comfortable in Japan during World War II. At least until the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii in December 1941 led to political tensions that forced her to relocate to Vietnam. But while she'd been in Japan, as long as getting a feel for that "ordered emptiness" she began to experiment with the potential of using bamboo in her design

Chaise longue basculante in bamboo (1940)

Tripod stool (1946)

Air France stacking table (1954)

You'll not be surprised to learn that she made a bamboo stool. Some of this understanding of how to incorporate local materials and local knowledge came back to Europe with her following the war. She made three legged shepherd's stools inspired by those she saw when taking walking and skiing trips in the Savoie region of France. 

The stacking tables she made for Air France are spidery yet practical. In 1955, fourteen years after she first visited Japan, she returned there. Now an internationally respected designer, she staged an exhibition, in  Tokyo, in which she demonstrated 'the art of dwelling'. Based on a central, and firm, belief that art, architecture, and industrial design should all combine harmoniously to create the modern home. Perriand called it, again, 'the synthesis of the arts'.

There were, of course, tables and chairs as well as stools and cabinets. Leger and Le Corbusier provided artwork and there was just as much wood on show as there was metal, just as much rustic design as there was industrial. In the post-war period of reconstruction and modernisation, Perriand became ever more mindful of the fragility of life and when she said 'better to spend a day in the sun that to spend it dusting our useless objects' she perfectly encapsulated my thoughts when it comes to housework versus getting outdoors.

Wall lights with adjustable shade (1962)

Frederique Orvan - Photomontage, 'With a thousand apologies to the incumbent ministers, Elle constitutes the first Ministy of Women' (1950)

She wasn't joking. A 'hilarious', and very badly dated, Elle magazine article presented "as a laugh and with a thousand apologies" a fictional cabinet made up entirely of women (including Perriand) as if to mock women's prominence in the workplace following the war but Perriand, when interviewed by the magazine, played a straight bat.

When asked what her programme would be to get France back on its feet, she spoke to the urgency of building schools and hospitals as well as introducing fixed rents for landlords and renters' rights for tenants. Her desire to build a better society (or 'build back better' - the difference to our current administration was she meant it, she wasn't just lazily sloganeering) had no doubt been forged by the horrors of the war but she was funding these benevolent ideas with designs for student dormitories and ski resorts.

At this time, her chief collaborator was the architect and engineer Jean Prouve. Prouve ran his own metalworking factory, which was quite useful to Perriand, but she resolutely remained the star, calling Prouve's workshop her 'hardware store'. The Les Arcs ski resort in the Savoie region of France was, according to the curators at the Design Museum, the 'crowning achievement' of her career. A destination for tens of thousands of people, it was perhaps the most complete integration, and certainly that on the grandest scale, of her design, her architecture, and her passion for landscape.

Sadly, there's not much of it to see at the exhibition but that's ably compensated for by a mock up of her 1952 Maison du Mexique in Paris. A dormitory for Mexican students, Perriand began by removing the partition wall between bedroom and bathroom and replacing it with one of her beloved bookcases (storage, we're repeatedly informed, was always a keen love of Perriand's) which doubles up as a room divider and makes the room feel bigger.

Maison de Mexique student's room (recreation based on the 1952 original)

Le Corbusier - Les huits (1951)

Pernette Perriand-Barsac - Jacques Martin's apartment in Rio de Janeiro (1963)

Soon, other high profile gigs came her way. Erno Goldfinger, the architect who has been celebrated as much as he has been bemoaned for buildings like Trellick Tower in West London, invited Perriand to work with him on the interior of the now demolished (and missed by modernist architecture enthusiasts) French Railways House on Piccadilly.

Across London, on New Bond Street, she was asked to refurbish the offices of Air France (her idea was to place a large Cambodian sculpture in the foyer to give visitors the travel bug and she also brought in chairs made by Charles and Ray Eames. "The organisation of leisure" said Perriand at the time "is one of the most urgent problems".

First world problems? Much as I dislike that combination of three words (and even more so, the way people misuse it) it does seem to be a case of such. But Perriand was a success and she seemed to enjoy the trappings of that success. Can we hold her guilty for that when most architects and designers, not least the sainted Frank Lloyd Wright, chose to work on private commissions rather than public works?

Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret - Refuge Tonneau, model (1938)

It's not just where the money is. It's where, often, you're most free to express yourself and Perriand certainly did that. Refuge Tonneau, a model of which you can see above, was based on a children's merry-go-round and could be erected in just four days while at the same time being light enough to be carried up steep slopes. It was robust enough to withstand the Alpine weather that it is designed to keep out at night and the beds inside can be transformed into benches for work during waking hours.

Perriand wanted, she said, to "establish a perfect harmony between the sky, the mountain pastures and mankind". To paraphrase The New Seekers, she wanted to teach the world to ski in perfect harmony. Such a huge project was it, that Les Arcs took over twenty years to complete - and that's building over more than one thousand rooms each year. Each of which was given a clear view of the surrounding mountains

This timescale made it not just her most epic project but one of her last. But in making it, it seems to me that Perriand finally, and contentedly, fulfilled a desire she had expressed throughout her career". "Man", she had said, "is really happy only when he strives, when he attempts something and makes a success of it:his happiness cannot be solely material".

Charlotte Perriand strove to design better homes so that we could live better lives and Charlotte Perriand succeeded in doing that. When she died in 1999, in Paris at the age of 96, she hopefully died happy and without regret. Her happiness may have been partly due to material circumstances but, I like to think, the greater part of it came from the fact that she strived to create and that she succeeded very well in that act.

 Unknown photographer - Charlotte Perriand facing a valley (c.1930)

Robert Doisneau - Charlotte Perriand in her studio, Paris (1991)