Jean-Michel Frank. Un décorateur dans le Paris des anées 30
Sous la direction de Pierre-Emmanuel Martin-Vivier
Norma Éditions, Paris 2009 (pp. 140 s.i.p.)
Drawing its readers in and almost leading
them by the hand, this catalogue written by
several authors celebrates an exhibition organised
by the Fondation Bergé/Saint Laurent in
Paris, open until January 2010.
With its changes of colour and pace, the
book's graphic design sets itself apart from
the pompous celebration typical of so many
monographs. Thus we are introduced to quite
a "special" person, who also did a lot of scene
changing before his premature, self-inflicted
demise in 1941. Jean-Michel Frank would be
hard to explain had he not lived in France during
the interwar years, where the traditionalist
cream of the nobility met up with the experimental
avant-gardes. Frank was the epitome
of the decorator, carrying forward a tradition
at least 200 years old that revisited Percier and
Fontaine and all the king Louises of France with
a lightness that was uncommon in the rest of
French Art Deco. His soft modernisation moved
between the poles of archaism and anonymity,
although surrealism did knock at the door, and
who could resist such an irresistible humanisation
of the object?
While he cultivated a somewhat neutral
receptacle, lining it with parchment, straw,
gold-leaf or pickled oak panelling almost to
make it disappear, he also created a minimal
interior tone that offered the perfect backdrop
to a fanciful new surrealist piece that would
light up the stage in a different manner. On one
hand he was a designer, when he worked on
the surrounding walls and revisited the more
"basic" pieces of furniture. But on the other
he was an entrepreneur (or publisher or smallscale
manufacturer), when he wanted to boost
the modernist drive, leaving the lion's share of
the attention to Dalí, Giacometti and Christian
Bérard, who joined his team one after the other.
His public showcase was a shop in Rue Faubourg
Saint-Honoré, opened in 1935 and closed in
1939. In its two symmetrical windows, slender
console tables clad with sharkskin might find themselves supporting large industrial metal floodlights,
creating minor contrasts of modernity that placed him far
from Le Corbusier and equally distant from the worlds of
decorative arts à la Ruhlmann and Leleu. On his very personal
journey, his point of reference was on the level of
the extraordinary, with extraordinary patrons such as the
viscounts of Noailles, and their hotel particulier overflowing
with Rubenses, Goyas and Balthuses, the extraordinary
and unbridled Marie Laure, a tireless sponsor of interdisciplinary
performances, and extraordinary clients such as
Elsa Schiaparelli, Nelson Rockefeller, Jean-Pierre Guerlain
and the Argentinian agriculture and food industrialist Jorge
Born.
Frank did not really want the interior to represent
itself in the first person (with a resulting iconic reduction
that some saw as early minimalism). Instead, he wanted it
to portray a poetic that was the product of an intellectual
circle, a congregation of several
minds with a single manufacturing
spirit. Without the contribution
of several sensitivities, and without
a symphony that allowed and
fostered contrast, there would yet
again have been a visible risk of
lapsing into "style".
There was no style, therefore,
but a subtle intention to place the
focus on the Matisses, Légers and
Picassos in the New York Rockefeller
apartment (1939), where acajou
panelling conceals cupboards and
shelves in the curves of a rounded
rectangle. Rather than style there
is a drastic annihilation of furniture
in the fixed interior panelling
of the Artaud lounge (1936)
in Paris, where the white on white
of the room's walls is bolstered by
a minimal geometric relief (and
an ensuing squared furnishing
design). In 1939, Frank said goodbye
to Paris for racial reasons and
headed for New York, then Buenos
Aires in 1940, before returning to
New York the following year. There,
deraciné and forced to live in the
western hemisphere with no hope
of repeating the environment of
Paris, which by then he saw as
historically unique, he decided to
throw himself from a skyscraper.
Manolo De Giorgi
Jean-Michel Frank
Jean-Michel Frank would be hard to explain had he not lived in France during the interwar years, where the traditionalist cream of the nobility met up with the experimental avant-gardes.
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- Manolo De Giorgi
- 15 January 2010