Charlotte Perriand: happiness by design

In most of the photographs of Charlotte Perriand, whether as a precocious pioneer in the 1920s or as a contented old woman in the 1990s, she is smiling. In one of the most famous you can’t tell, as she turns her naked back to the camera in order to salute with upraised arms a snowy mountain landscape, but you can guess that she is. It is certainly an exultant image. The famous creators with whom she worked – Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Isamu Noguchi – are more often shown solemn and serious, in keeping with their image as men of destiny.

There are many things that can be said about Perriand (1903-99) – that she was the principal author of some of the 20th century’s most memorable pieces of furniture, that she could be as inventive with traditional materials such as bamboo as she was with tubular steel, that she could turn her unique hand and eye to furniture, to photographs, to impassioned political photomontages, to a 30,000-bed ski resort. Among the most important is that she believed in “the joy of creating and living”, as she put it, “in this century of ours.”

“You have to keep your eyes as open as fans,” she told her daughter, Pernette Perriand-Barsac. “Nothing is off the table,” she also said, “there is no single answer.” And so, although she made her name in her 20s as an exponent of the machine age aesthetic, she aligned herself with no single style. She based a carpet on an untutored drawing by a sailor she met on a voyage to Japan. If she saw a remarkable piece of wood, a magnificent slice of jacaranda in Brazil, for example, she would design a table to suit it. Her photographs bring out the beauty of driftwood, fish bones and scrap metal, of pieces of ice lifted against the sky.

Charlotte Perriand has now been honoured by a mighty exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, which takes over, across four floors, its big, rambling Frank Gehry building. There are, as well as furniture, drawings and photographs, reconstructions of lost interiors and installations, and realisations for the first time of projects that were never built. Perriand’s Maison au bord de l’eau of 1934 is constructed next to a sunken cascade at the bottom of Gehry’s building. Her prefabricated mountain refuge of 1938 – an aluminium-clad polygon with porthole windows – anticipates Stanley Kubrick by several decades. Except that, in about the place where you might meet Hal the computer, you find a dignified but basic bucket, for storing and dispensing water.

Perriand had a gift for collaboration, a quality recognised by the exhibition’s inclusion of work by the impressive array of artists she knew. There is a gigantic Léger, commissioned by Perriand for the Milan Triennale of 1951. There are Picassos that hung in the apartment of the collector Maurice Jardot and at the Galerie Louise Leiris, spaces designed by Perriand.

These works certainly give the show oomph, and convey the milieux in which she moved, as well as communicating the generous and open way in which she worked. She didn’t have to be the star of the show. But they are shown in such numbers as to threaten to drown out her pieces. Paintings are in their natural habitat in an art gallery, whereas furniture is not. In places you feel that the foundation got carried away by its ability to show, for example, a cartoon by Picasso for a tapestry of his Guernica, on the slightly sketchy grounds that he and Perriand shared “an esteem for crafts” and that they were both enraged by the Spanish civil war. Big though the exhibition is, and magnificent though it mostly is, it is light on some wonderful Perriand creations, such as the stone-and-timber chalet she designed for herself at Méribel in the French Alps. It could have done with more on this and fewer masterpieces by others.

The prevalence of the paintings also effects an inversion of Perriand’s intentions. She wanted to bring art into everyday life, to which end she staged exhibitions in which paintings were shown alongside ordinary objects. Now, in an age when chairs and tables like hers are prized auction room items, an exhibition like this turns everyday objects into art.

There is, of course, not much to be done about the fact that historic items of furniture can no longer be sat upon, and to their credit the Louis Vuitton Foundation does offer some replica Perriands on which to rest, but it requires a small imaginative effort to recall that the exhibits were made to be felt as well as seen. The joy of which Perriand spoke was bodily as well as visual or mental, to be found in her love of skiing, in the texture and yield of leather or fabric, in the spaces for physical exercise that she proposed for homes of the future.

There is another famous photograph of Perriand. She is lying on the adjustable chaise longue of 1928, the gracefully revolutionary work of steel, chrome, rubber and fabric that she designed along with Le Corbusier and his cousin and colleague Pierre Jeanneret. It is set to maximum reclining mode, feet higher than head. Perriand is wearing a necklace of ball bearings, a sign of her belief in the beauty of the machine age. Her face turned partly away, she happens not to be smiling in what is a less spontaneous shot than others of her. But it still expresses her fundamental belief – that life, and design, is about “the cultivation of happiness”.