Jean Prouvé was generous, both in its way of seeing design and architecture and in its way of working. The son of the painter and scupltor Victor Prouvé was trained to be a metalworker and he quickly figured out he needed to innovate. He would never copy. In order to put into practice what the artists from Ecole de Nancy taught him, Jean created his workshop in 1924. There, he made his first folded sheet metal pieces of furniture, since he had a preference for this technique over the steel tube. This man from Nancy, loyal tometallic materials, worked with them during its whole career as an architect and designer. Imagining furniture led him to design buildings as famous as “La Maison du Peuple” in Clichy. He thought these two activities were based on a logic of making and functionnality which results in unpretentious aesthetics. An industrial truth coming from a constantquestioning about design and material. According to Jean Prouvé, someone able to build a building must be able to create a piece of furniture. His approach was global. The structures, made from the 30’s in the brand new “Ateliers Prouvé” – which he would have tomove to Maxéville a few years later because of a lack of space -, were designed to be put together and jointed, which enables us to assemble, modify and disassemble any object he made. It’s the case for the emblematic Standard chair we saw in Pierre Le Ny‘s and Jean-Baptiste Bouvier‘s apartment. These two design lovers even opened the gallery Bouvier Le Ny, a gallery specialised in furniture made by the members of the French Union of Modern Artists (UAM), which Prouvé cofounded. Following the example of gallery Seguin, well-known for this very same speciality. Today, people fight for the artist’s creations. Whether it be his historical potence, a master’s work of art, or his office equipment, the madness caused by this French modernist icon is not going to end soon.
Photography: Constance Gennari – Text: Caroline Balvay @thesocialitefamily
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