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Modernism Redux: Back to the Furniture

Kristine McKenna is a regular contributor to Calendar

Remember the future? It’s been one of the driving ideals of the 20th century, but it’s looking increasingly threadbare as we lurch toward the millennium.

If you doubt that the future as utopian concept has been left behind like a forgotten umbrella, take a trip to the Margo Leavin Gallery, where the exhibition “Modernist French Furniture” is on view through Aug. 23.

The exhibition’s selection of 24 works dating from 1941 through 1960 by four of France’s leading Modernist designers--Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouve, Georges Jouve and Serge Mouille--harks back to a time when it was believed that good design could heal the ills of society and create a golden future for everyone.

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Espousing the holistic approach to environmental design associated with French architect Le Corbusier and the German Bauhaus, these artists believed that the interior and exterior of a building should be the seamlessly integrated product of a single vision. Toward that end, they designed both structures and the furnishings that went inside. Often exhibiting together at Galerie Steph Simon--which opened in Paris in 1956 and was the primary dealer of this material--they adapted techniques and materials developed during World War II to create spare domestic objects that celebrated function over form.

“The designers of this period had a certain naivete,” says Steven Henry, associate director of the Leavin Gallery and curator of the show. “Urban ills didn’t disappear because there was good design--in fact, the high-rise apartments central to Le Corbusier’s vision of the ‘new city’ proved to be rather inhospitable. In other words, the plan didn’t work.”

No, it didn’t, and by 1967, when French auteur Jacques Tati released “Play Time”--a brilliant parody of the Modernist lifestyle--the French were rushing to the waste bin with their Modernist objets.

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“The French consul recently came to see this show and he said that when he was a kid people threw this stuff away all the time--and that’s one reason there isn’t much of it around now. It took a lot of perseverance to track these pieces down,” says Henry, who did his hunting in Europe and on the U.S. East Coast. “Moreover, when you do find pieces, they usually show considerable wear and tear. The ceramic work by Jouve was particularly hard to find, because that material was really out of favor for several years.” (All the works on view came from the Jouve family estate.)

High Modernism was inarguably relegated to the shadows for a spell, but it seems that once an aesthetic makes the team of significant stylistic innovations, though it may get benched for a while, it always gets to return to the playing field. Evidence of the Modernist revival abounds these days, from Philippe Stark’s comically mannered renovation of the Mondrian Hotel in Hollywood to the resurrected reputation of architect Gregory Ain.

“With distance and time people learn to appreciate things in different ways,” Henry says. “At the moment there’s a trend toward stripped-down design that dispenses with ornamentation. Most of the furniture sold at places like Ikea and the Pottery Barn, for instance, is based on blocky, simple lines, and though it’s often tarted up to seem cozier, the fundamental design is rooted in the Modernist aesthetic of the ‘50s.”

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The star of the Leavin show is Perriand, who was the subject of a 1985 retrospective exhibition at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in France and another last spring at the Design Museum in London.

“Because there’s been such a neglect of study of women architects and designers, people are trying to redress that oversight, and there’s a great deal of interest in Perriand,” Henry says.

Perriand, now 94 and the only one of the four artists still living, worked in 1927-37 in the studio of Le Corbusier, who initially dismissed her application for employment with the comment “we don’t embroider cushions here.” Perriand persisted and eventually won the respect of the great man--in fact, it has recently been proved that many designs credited to Le Corbusier were actually her work. Autocratic though Le Corbusier was, Perriand expresses unstinting admiration for him, and in a 1996 interview for the New York Times Magazine, she credited him with “tearing down the wall that had been obstructing my view of the future.”

Among Perriand’s production were several collaborations with Jean Prouve, who designed office buildings, public housing and schools in France during the ‘50s. Included in the exhibition is a bookcase of stamped aluminum and pine that Prouve made in collaboration with Perriand and artist Sonia Delaunay. The bookcase--a Mondrian-like grid that Henry calls “the masterpiece in the show”--was commissioned by the French government in 1953 for use in La Maison de Mexique at the Cite Universitaire de Paris; it was one of several pieces commissioned by the government for use in dormitory rooms. (The furnishings of an entire room have been reassembled for the first time at the Leavin Gallery.)

Also on view is a steel-and-terrazzo table by Prouve (one in a series of 12 he produced) and a table and chair set Prouve created for children, which Henry located in New York. Both pieces incorporate the boomerang forms and tapered triangles characteristic of the designer’s work.

Fleshing out the show are ceramic forms by Jouve, whose career ended prematurely in 1964 when he was incapacitated by illness, and lamps by Mouille, a colleague of Alexander Calder’s who was trained as a metal smith. Mouille’s whimsical metal lamps were quite popular in the ‘50s, but he nonetheless abandoned the enterprise in 1962 to teach art (which is what he did up until his death in 1988).

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“These artists came of age between the wars, surrounded by the lavish elegance of Art Deco, but the combination of the Depression and World War II brought an end to opulent design,” Henry says. “It gave way to the notion of designing for the masses, and all four of these artists stayed true to that idea throughout their careers. Artists who worked with and around Le Corbusier were devoted to the concept of the ‘new city’ and believed that industrialization could improve people’s lives.

“However, the bulk of their designs never went into mass production, and it’s rather ironic who the audience for this work is today. The collecting base for this work is primarily in Europe--art dealers and artists make up a large percentage of that base--and people who collect this stuff tend to have their entire environment done in High Modern style.”

Needless to say, these artists didn’t conceive of their creations as rarefied objects for display in the homes of wealthy collectors.

“It’s a little disappointing,” Perriand said in the 1996 New York Times interview, referring to the legacy of Modernism. “We thought mankind was going to improve, and that’s where we made our mistake. Architects today make monuments --everywhere there are monuments. It’s pointless. Meanwhile, the place that people call home is left to the taste of real estate developers and handymen.”

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“MODERNIST FRENCH FURNITURE,” Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., Hollywood. Dates: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Ends Aug. 23. Phone: (310) 273-0603.

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