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| Passion Investments: Antiques |
Institutional Invention
Jane Innes
10/01/2005
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Jean Prouvé furniture aficionados are not people who simply collect. They are
not even discerning, educated, design-loving people who collect. They are almost
invariably people who are totally enamored VALUE JUDGEMENT
Jean Prouvé’s Modernist furniture designs were once standard issue in French
schools, government offices and corporate headquarters. Many pieces were
destroyed when these institutions were remodeled. Today Prouvé’s designs are
esteemed as the epitome of forward-thinking fittings and fetch prices in the
high six digits—and more. But experts worry that now is a poor time for
collectors to buy. Prices have risen so dramatically in recent years that some
wonder how this trend can possibly continue. |
with the work of this “beloved figure
of French design,” as Richard Wright, the president of Wright Auctions in
Chicago, describes him.
Although Le Corbusier once said that Prouvé combined
“the soul of an engineer with that of an architect,” in fact, he was neither.
Rather, he considered himself to be a constructeur—quite simply, a builder.
Beginning in the 1920s, Prouvé worked with some of the most forward-thinking
architects of the period, designing mass-produced structures in such radical
materials as sheet steel and aluminum for a multitude of socially redeemable
causes, among them housing refugees and the homeless.
But Prouvé’s furniture,
designed mainly for institutional use, drives the molten-hot collector’s market
for his work today. He came up with his first piece, the iconic Standard chair,
with its gently curved plywood seat and back and angular steel rear legs, in the
early 1930s at Les Ateliers J. Prouvé, his communally run factory just outside
the eastern French city of Nancy. During World War II, Prouvé was active in the
French Resistance and, after the war, was chosen mayor of Nancy. Returning to
his factory, he crafted such unusual designs as camp-style beds with combined
headboards and bookshelves, dining tables with cubbies beneath them where items
such as napkins could be stored, and desks with long, fluorescent lighting
fixtures arching horizontally, like bridges, from one side to the other. Such
innovative pieces became commonplace in the French lycées, hospitals and
university dormitories. But today they are increasingly cherished and
rare.
Their appeal is obvious. For all its utilitarianism, Prouvé’s furniture
soars. Executed for the most part in metal and wood, the pieces have
exhilarating, aeronautic lines—Prouvé was influenced by both airplane and car
design—and still look contemporary today. Fashionable in America for the last
decade, their popularity shows no signs of flagging. Prouvé collectors, who
include actor Brad Pitt, Coach president Reed Krakoff and gallery owner Larry
Gagosian, tend to cleave emotionally to the work. “I love him,” is the simple
answer Jaewoong Chung, an interior designer with K + C Design in New York, gives
when asked why he collects Prouvé. “It’s more a passion,” adds Cristina
Grajales, a Manhattan consultant on 20th-century design who counts Chung and
other Prouvé aficionados among her clients. “Love is more involved than
investment.”
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