Charlotte Perriand's Work Transformed Rooms. Now It Fills a Museum

If you ask decorators, architects and other aesthetes to name their favorite modernist, French designer Charlotte Perriand comes up more often than not.

Perriand lived from 1903 to 1999, nearly spanning the 20th century, and she made the most of her decades, designing buildings, furniture, rooms and objects at an impressive clip. She found a way to match the strict modernist demand for utility and practicality with the elusive quality known as good taste.

Many of her works remain influential reference points today: her colorful Nuage cabinet (imagine a 3D version of a Mondrian painting); the sleek chaise longue she designed with the cousins Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier) and Pierre Jeanneret, which was covered in a chic pony skin; her later collaborations with architect Jean Prouvé; and the lodgings she created in the 1960s and ’70s for the Les Arcs ski resort in Savoie, France.

Hers was a big career, and now she is getting an exhibition to match her stature, with 400 works by Perriand and her circle on view at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris from Oct. 2 to Feb. 24.

“Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World,” the largest exhibition of her work to date, required four years and five curators to organize. It features not only 200 of her own pieces (some of them collaborations) but also works by Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and other artists, in recognition of her many forays across the art-design divide. Léger, a friend and frequent breakfast companion, is represented by more than 50 contributions alone.

The curatorial committee was made up of the designer’s daughter, Pernette Perriand, an architect herself; Perriand’s husband, Jacques Barsac, a writer who is the author of his mother-in-law’s catalog raisonné; Sébastien Cherruet, the head of institutional relations at the luxury conglomerate LVMH; and art historians Gladys Fabre and Sébastien Gokalp.

The offerings include not only Charlotte Perriand’s greatest hits — seating and cabinetry from the 1920s to the 1950s — but also black-and-white photographs and an odd surrealist sculpture in stone and wood from 1969 that was a nonfunctional departure for her.

The exhibition will also recreate nine of her most renowned rooms, including the one that really launched her career in 1929, the Salon d’Automne, named for the annual exhibition where it appeared. It featured chrome-tube furniture in an open plan that was strikingly futuristic at the time.

This room hammers home the theme that Perriand’s reputation shouldn’t rest solely on her furniture, the most visible part of her legacy.

“She designed spaces, not just the objects in them,” Cherruet said.

Perriand has legions of fans, but for the Vuitton Foundation, one of them matters above all: Bernard Arnault, the chairman, chief executive and founder of the museum, and among the richest people in the world.

It is no surprise that in the five years since the Vuitton Foundation opened in a Frank Gehry-designed building in the Bois de Boulogne, there has been much overlap between exhibitions there and Arnault’s personal collection, as with last year’s blockbuster show on Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“The museum reflects his taste,” said Jean-Paul Claverie, a senior adviser to Arnault on the museum and cultural matters. “He was an early collector of Perriand, as he was of Basquiat.”

In an email interview, Arnault said that he began collecting Perriand’s furniture in the 1980s, beginning with a mahogany buffet from 1960. “I was immediately struck by its precision, authenticity and simplicity, as well as its sheer elegance,” he said.

That was just a gateway drug of sorts, leading him next to bookshelves and ultimately to a favorite work.

“The piece I use most often is a free-form table that I use as a desk,” Arnault said. “There’s a radical symmetry in its silhouette, a softness to the wood that has a natural and sophisticated look.” The patina, he added, gets “more beautiful each day.”

The foundation shows the work of many living artists, but Perriand is relevant to its mission, Claverie said.

“We’re devoted to the contemporary, but we don’t want to forget the past, which for us is the modern art roots of what’s being made now,” he said.

Perriand was a Parisian native but she traveled outside France often, sometimes for years at a time. “I was impressed by how she had a dialogue with other cultures in Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico and Japan,” Claverie said.

The exhibition is divided into 11 main sections, one of which details Perriand’s long association with architects in Japan.

According to Barsac’s “Charlotte Perriand: Complete Works,” the fourth volume of which will be published in English this fall, she first traveled to Japan in 1940 at the invitation of the government to advise its leaders on industrial art. She stayed until 1942.

Perriand returned several times in the 1950s, at one point redesigning the Air France offices in Tokyo and Osaka. She was particularly inspired by the use of bamboo in Japanese crafts. Junzo Sakakura, an architect with whom she collaborated on the interior of the Japanese ambassador’s home in Paris, said that of all the Western architects who worked in Japan, she probably had the most influence on design there.

Also included in the Vuitton show is a late-career project, the Maison de Thé, created in 1993 for the garden of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and highlighting Japanese designers.

That topic is but one of the side roads the exhibition travels. Putting together such a large show had its challenges, said Cherruet, especially the nine room recreations. One of them, Perriand’s Maison du Jeune Homme of 1935 incorporated a 12-foot-long Léger work, “La salle de culture physique — Le sport,” which was painted the same year.

The curators wanted it for the show, so they hunted for it.

“We spent hours trying to find the Léger,” Cherruet said. “No one knew where it was.”

The work was in the hands of an American collector who hadn’t advertised his possession of it “because he didn’t want museums asking him to lend it,” Cherruet said. The collector changed his mind upon learning that the Léger was not for a normal show but “for a recreation of a Perriand space,” he added.

The designer has no greater champion than Pernette Perriand, who worked with her mother for years. Maintaining an archive and supporting shows like the Vuitton exhibition, Perriand said in an email interview, is “an enormous undertaking.” She added that her mother’s pervasive influence remains forceful, in good ways and bad.

“She continues to inspire everyone in the design world,” Perriand said. “It’s funny, because some time ago nobody used tapered feet. Charlotte created them back in the day, and you see that this is inspiring contemporary designers.”

What is “more annoying,” she added, was seeing outright copies of her work.

Then again, anything that demonstrates the lasting influence of her mother could be taken as a positive.

“When you stop talking about people,” Perriand said, “they disappear.”

This article originally appeared in

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