For an Undersung Designer, an Overdue Retrospective

Over a century after her birth, the French designer Charlotte Perriand is finally getting her due. A retrospective of the pioneering avant-garde architect, who changed the course of 20th-century design with her elegant, industrial-inspired interior design and furniture, is now open at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. “Charlotte Perriand: Inventing A New World” features 200 of her designs, alongside the work of 15 artists from her time (for example, the French modernist Fernand Léger, whose artwork she sometimes featured in her interiors) and seven designers from her era, including the self-taught architect and metal worker Jean Prouvé. While Perriand may be best known for the Chaise Longue Basculante B306 — an adjustable steel lounge chair that she created in 1928 while working at Le Corbusier’s studio in her 20s — her contributions also include a prefabricated mountain resort in Savoie, France, asymmetrical wooden bookcases that call to mind paintings by Piet Mondrian and a necklace made of oversize ball bearings. “People keep thinking she’s a woman who designed just a few chairs with Le Corbusier,” says Sébastien Cherruet, a co-curator of the exhibition. “It’s not fair and doesn’t do justice to her work.”

Perriand, who was born in Paris in 1903, trained as a furniture designer at Ecole de L’Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. She experimented with glass and aluminum in the 1920s, making mechanical-inspired furniture that rejected the decorative Beaux-Arts movement, both in her own practice and while working as an associate with Le Corbusier. She turned to nature for inspiration in the 1930s, designing the interiors of Parisian homes, in addition to creating furniture. Perriand was bold and unconventional with the rooms she brought to life, hanging paintings by Léger, photographing fish bones as art and using cartoonish drawings by children as the basis for tapestries. At a time when female artists were often limited to working in textiles, she ranged fearlessly across mediums and fought for equal credit for her designs with Le Corbusier. “She was a strong woman ahead of her time,” says Cherruet. One photograph in the exhibition, in particular, captures her free spirit: Taken in or around 1929, it shows Perriand standing topless, arms raised, on a mountaintop in Sestriere, Italy. “Her message is very contemporary today,” says Cherruet. “It’s not just looking to the past; it’s a mind-set for the future.” “Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World” is on view now through Feb. 24, 2020, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, 8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, Paris, fondationlouisvuitton.fr — NADJA SAYEJ