Post-War French Design
French furniture, lighting and ceramics from the late 1940s to the 1960s, when reconstruction, new industry and a playful spirit reshaped interiors.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Post-War French Design are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Post-war France had towns to rebuild and few materials to spare, so designers made furniture in numbers for schools, student halls and new flats. Jean Prouvé's workshops at Maxéville, near Nancy, pressed and folded sheet steel into sturdy desks, chairs and prefabricated houses. Charlotte Perriand worked with him on bookcases for the Maison de la Tunisie (1952), a Paris student residence, combining steel with coloured sliding panels. Pierre Jeanneret spent the 1950s and 1960s in Chandigarh, India, designing teak and cane furniture for the new city.
Beside this rigour a more sensuous strand flourished. Jean Royère's rounded Ours Polaire sofa and Serge Mouille's black articulated lamps brought wit and elegance, and Georges Jouve gave ceramics glossy sculptural forms. In the 1960s Pierre Paulin stretched fabric over foam for the Ribbon chair (1966), and Olivier Mourgue's low Djinn seating appeared in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
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