Charlotte Perriand was a renowned French architect and designer whose career is often tied to her sometime collaborators Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Jean Prouvé.¹ However, she began working on her own beginning in the late 1930s, achieving even greater fame for her practice. Perriand studied at the École de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs from 1920 to 1925. Seeing her work at the 1927 Salon d’Autumne exhibition convinced Le Corbusier to hire her for his atelier. After leaving in 1937, Perriand began to work with Jean Prouvé during the early years of World War II. In August 1940, at the invitation of the Japanese government, she left France to act as a consultant to the Industrial Arts Research Institute of Sendai, an organization tasked with reforming traditional Japanese craft. First in Sendai, then in Tokyo and Kyoto, Perriand researched Japanese crafts and aesthetics, organized and participated in exhibitions, met artists, and delved deep into mingei (art of the people) and material usage. Beginning in 1942, she lived in Indochina, performing similar tasks to those in Japan, before returning to France in 1946.

 

In 1951 a ski chalet called Vire-Vent was built in Megève, France, for Roger Bernard, the head of the company that had undertaken the construction of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille, France. Bernard had commissioned the architect Georges Candilis to create the modest chalet, and Candilis, in return, asked Perriand to design its interior architecture and furnishings. The four-bedroom home included three children’s bedrooms, a primary bedroom, an open kitchen, a dining area, a living room, and storage spaces. One of Perriand’s furniture designs for the primary bedroom was a pair of free-form desks. Equipped with a single aluminum drawer and accompanied by one of her four-legged stools, the desks were of a custom size and design in order to fit the interior space. These desks took inspiration from an En Forme desk that she had designed in 1938. The original model was of a large size with a boomerang-style top, a file-cabinet drawer, and a storage space that contained a telephone stand and shelves. The following year, she refined the design by shrinking its proportions and installing an aluminum drawer on the wider end of the tabletop. The desk in the Museum’s collection—one of two from the Megève chalet commission—is extremely rare and was never produced again at this scale. It remained in situ and in the possession of the original family until 2007.²

 

Around 1947, through the efforts of Georges Blanchon, a furniture manufacturer with whom Perriand and Jeanneret worked during World War II, they were able to produce some new furniture designs in small numbers. The furniture was economical, using woods such as mahogany, ash, poplar, and pine, and made by hand. Perriand’s En Forme desk was part of the offerings. It was available with one or two drawers, in varnished pine or oak, or in triple-veneered and varnished ash. —Cindi Strauss