During the 30s, in parallel with her activity as a designer, Charlotte Perriand devoted herself to photography, traveling across Europe creating images which then became a source of inspiration for her projects, furnishing elements, but also real works of art. 'art.
The subjects follow one another in a gesture of intuitive choice: he records, annotates, imprints the forms (and ideas) that capture his attention. And so the metal structure of a bridge, the texture of a fisherman's net, a stone become the starting points for the creation of his tables, bookcases and armchairs.
The discovery of a few hundred negatives, conserved in the Charlotte Perriand Archives, was an opportunity to present and investigate her photographic work in a broad and articulated way. This exhibition aims to introduce her photographic work, less known to the general public but which has played an important role in the construction of her creative imagination. Photography, to which Perriand dedicates several years of his career, has been the laboratory of her visual and philosophical research and the manifesto of her political commitment. Alongside some of her design works, vintage and modern, which have become true icons of the 55th century, Galleria Carla Sozzani presents a selection of XNUMX photographs from the Nicéphore Niépce Museum and the Charlotte Perriand archive. Her photographic research is part of the avant-garde movement, in which painters, architects and photographers work side by side in an atmosphere of sharing and where every expression is enriched by the "gaze" of the other. It is with this spirit and thanks to her friendship with Fernard Lèger and Pierre Jeanneret that Perriand begins to collect and photograph the objects she finds in nature: bones, skeletons, rocks, roots, stones…
"Our backpacks - as she writes - were full of these treasures ... which we baptized with the name Art Brut ». Between 1933 and 1937 she carried on her photographic experimentation, with the series "Art Brut" and "Objets Trouvés", referring to the idea of a return to nature understood as primordial beauty, purity of lines and strength of matter.
a trip to Japan. Charlotte Perriand has never exhibited or published her photographic work, except
of some photomontages made on public commission. His photographs, as an expression of a peculiar creativity, were revealed in part in the retrospective exhibition at the Center Pompidou in Paris in 2005 and in the exhibition “Modernism, Designing a New World, 1914-1939” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2006; and subsequently in the exhibition “Charlotte Perriand, de la photographie au design” at the Petit Palais in Paris in 2011 and finally in 2012 “Charlotte Perriand, la photographie pour un autre monde” at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon sur Saône, France.
Charlotte Perriand was born in Paris on October 24, 1903. He studied at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs (UCAD) in Paris and at the age of twenty he decided to become an architect, a profession considered exclusively male at the time. Having obtained a diploma in Interior Design in 1925, he followed the research poetics of the Bauhaus, rejected traditional decorative canons and
embraces the use of new industrial materials.
In 1927 he began his collaboration with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret at the famous atelier 35 in rue de Sèvres in Paris. In these years he kicks off his intense photographic production. In 1928 together with René Herbst, Djo-Bourgeois, Jean Fouquet, Gerard Sandoz and Jean Puiforcat, he formed an avant-garde group "L'unité de choc" with which he exhibited his "salle à manger", designed in 1927, at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. Two years later, followed by her avant-garde group, she will found the UAM (Union des Artistes Modernes). Also in 1927 she began to photograph with a 6 x 9 bellows camera given to her by her husband. In 1930 she met Walter Gropius and Fernand Léger,
with whom he establishes a close relationship of friendship and artistic collaboration.
His conception of living is always marked by the need to combine technical and scientific knowledge of materials in relation to space and the way of living and occupying it.
In 1932 he abandoned his studio in Place Saint Sulpice and moved to Montparnasse.
In the same years, during the Spanish civil war, he took part in demonstrations alongside the Republicans, participating in the intellectual circles of the Communist Party where he met Miró, Picasso, André Malraux and Blaise Cendrars.
After a decennial collaboration with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, together with whom
signs important pieces of furniture, leaves the studio in March 1937. In 1940 she is invited by the Japanese government as a consultant for the national production of industrial design. Her experience in Japan greatly influences her thinking and her way of working; you try to apply the new industrial forms to the local tradition. In 1943
she moved to Indochina and in May of the same year she married Jacques Martin, with
whom he will have a daughter, Pernette.
He returned to Paris in 1946 and in 1951 he was head of the French delegation at the 1964th Milan Triennale "Furniture and Decoration". The furniture designed by Le Corbusier-Jeanneret-Perriand was reissued in XNUMX by the Italian company Cassina.
Between 1996 and 1999 she curated three retrospectives on her work: “Charlotte Perriand Modernist Pioneer” at the Design Museum in London, “Charlotte Perriand Pioneer 20th Century” at the Living Design Center Ozone in Tokyo and “Une connivenceCharlotte Perriand-Fernand Léger” at the Musée National Fernand Léger. She died on October 27, 1999 in Paris.
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