PARIS — It was 1927, and Le Corbusier had already declared, “The house is a machine for living in.” But like Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times,” he hadn’t quite figured out how to live with the machine from a practical, everyday point of view in the living room, for example, or the bedroom. Yes, the machine was the messiah of the new Modernism, but how do you sit on one? How do you sleep and eat on it? Just how do you furnish modernity?
Corbusier returned that year to Paris from an exhibition of International Style buildings in Stuttgart, Germany, where his demonstration houses were furnished with Thonet bentwood chairs that looked retrograde compared to the tubular steel furniture by his German colleagues. He contacted the young Parisian furniture designer Charlotte Perriand, whom he had very recently rejected as a job applicant, saying “we don’t embroider cushions here.” He changed his mind after seeing an exhibit of her work at the Autumn Salon, where her streamlined, steel-zinc-and-glass “Bar in the Attic” — an installation of furniture, metal finishes, and a built-in bar — was captivating Paris. She had translated the spirit of the machine into a room.
Now he needed Perriand, a 24-year-old decorative-arts-school graduate, to invent just how people would actually inhabit his white, geometrically pristine villas. Together they embarked on a professional relationship that in today’s he-said, she-said era has raised he-designed/she-designed questions. Did he, or did she?
“Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World,” a generous exhibition sprawling across all four floors of the Fondation Louis Vuitton here through Feb. 24, spans seven decades of Perriand’s packed career. The show features meticulously researched recreations of Perriand rooms, including an art gallery, apartment and teahouse. Magisterial artworks by Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder, artists she knew in Paris’s tight circles, establish the friendships and visual partnerships she lived with as she integrated all the arts within rooms conceived for what she called the “art of living.”
Two drawings and a letter at the show’s start act as a Rosetta stone, clarifying a long-fuzzy mystery about the Perriand-Le Corbusier association, which would produce some of Modernism’s enduring icons, their chaise longue, lounge chairs and sofa.
In one 1927 drawing, Corbusier outlined typical sitting and lounging postures without proposing actual designs. Inventing the furniture itself would be Perriand’s job. In a 1928 sketch, she accommodated the lounging posture in the famous “chaise longue basculante,” drawing a movable chaise rocking in a steel cradle.
For many decades, Le Corbusier basically “owned” authorship of the several chairs on which they collaborated, primarily because his name was on the door, he was famous, and he was a guy. To this day, the Italian furniture manufacturer Cassina markets four of her own pieces within the “Le Corbusier collection” (while giving her individual design credit), and in one of MoMA’s rehung collection galleries, a label assigns the pivoting, tubular steel chair she designed before working with the architect to Le Corbusier, his cousin and collaborator Pierre Jeanneret, and Perriand. Le Corbusier still clouds her achievements.
The drawings suggest that Perriand solved the problems Le Corbusier defined. “Le Corbusier waited impatiently for me to bring the furniture to life,” she wrote in 1991 for her autobiography. In a 1932 letter, he confirmed that the “entire responsibility” of realizing the “domestic equipment” of his buildings was hers: “Madame Perriand possesses exceptional qualities of inventiveness, initiative and realization in this domain.”
A recreation of their stunning installation, “A Modern Apartment,” in the Autumn Salon of 1929, makes her mastery of interiors abundantly clear. Several of their chairs, along with stacked, modular storage units, orbit freely in an open Newtonian space that we would now call a loft. Le Corbusier had long advocated an open plan free of bearing walls, and within it, Perriand furnished a constellation of objects that made space “sing,” as she liked to say. Furniture came off the wall and belonged to the floor in free-form configurations no longer anchored to a fireplace and bourgeois rules of symmetry.
A small kitchen with movable counters and sliding shelves exemplifies her own signature idea of furniture and fixtures that move, dating from her own 1927 apartment-studio, with its swiveling chairs, sliding front door, and extendable dining table.
After a decade with Le Corbusier, she stepped out of his shadow into a successful career of her own.
In the late 1930s, breaking with Le Corbusier over her affinities with communism, Perriand emerged as an activist designer. Her giant photo montage mural of 1936, “The Great Misery of Paris,” re-created in the show, was a cri de coeur protesting the housing problems, pollution, bread lines and income inequality brought on by the machine and industrialization.
The woman who had defiantly sported a necklace of ball bearings in the ’20s turned away from the machine toward nature. A large gallery displays her photographs of tree rings, benches crafted with split logs, and solid, free-form wood dining and coffee tables. Off-center shelves invite displays of driftwood, rocks and animal skeletons, nature’s “art,” free for anyone who hiked in the woods.
Perriand set her own design agenda. Invited to Japan just before the war, she initiated an industrial design program for a culture importing modernity. The country had little history of chairs and furniture but had a rich tradition of natural materials like bamboo and rattan, which Perriand adapted to designs extrapolated from the International style.
Back in postwar Europe, she turned to the task of reconstruction, designing minimally sized rooms in university dorms that synthesized color, form and composition in succinct masterworks of function.
Working in Le Corbusier’s studio, she, in effect, became an architect. For a 1934 competition, she designed a prefabricated seaside cabin, dramatically constructed in the Vuitton show. In 1938 she collaborated with Pierre Jeanneret on a futuristic metal-clad mountain pod called “The Refuge Barrel.”
Her experience across disciplines, from furniture to industrial design to architecture, culminated in the huge, 30,000-bed ski complex in the Alps, Les Arcs (1967-1989), where curving apartment blocks follow the contours of the slopes.
The show ends poetically on the recreation of a teahouse she designed in 1993, at 90, getting every detail right for a floating pavilion enclosed by stands of bamboo under a parachute of translucent fabric inspired by sailboats. She understood Japan, and had the talent and skills to capture its ineffable ethos.
With hundreds of objects and a dozen full-size room installations, “Inventing a New World” presents ample evidence that Perriand, who died in 1999, was a major design force through most of the century.
She lived her times, and like her own first apartment, with its moving parts, her imagination and career never stayed still. There was life after Le Corbusier.
Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World
Through Feb. 24 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en.