PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION Executed for the same interior scheme as the Alberto Giacometti works sold in Christie's 14 December 2012 sale of Important 20th C Decorative Art & Design, the present selection of furnishings and objects must be considered to be amongst the most resolved of Jean-Michel Frank's works of the 1930s. Beginning his career around 1920 and initially working for a handful of clients, Frank's creativity as a decorator was to take a new dimension when he began his collaboration with the cabinetmaker Adolphe Chanaux, yielding a capacity to now attract commissions from both sides of the Atlantic. During the second part of his career, lasting throughout the 1930s, Frank was able to perfect his style by refining his earlier more extreme designs, to embrace noble and traditional materials that now included oak, mahogany, sycamore, bronze and gilded woods. In doing so, Frank developed a style that incorporated historicist elements, drawing upon influences that may have included Second Empire, Biedermeier, Louis XV or - as evident in certain of the present works -- Louis XVI, the Renaissance, and with allusions towards the Arts & Crafts movement. Despite these reference points, Frank remained driven by his own vision, conceiving interiors which were less defined by what they were, but rather by what they were not, with asceticism, tranquility and a sensitivity towards impoverished luxury remaining constants. Theatricality for its own sake was discarded in preference towards an environment of elliptical allusion, pin-points of visual intimacy, and furnishings that offered a conceptual resonance. The innovation of Frank's interiors was in part enhanced by the artistic personalities that were part of his milieu, amongst whom could be counted the architects Paul Rodocanachi and Emilio Terry, the sculptors Henri Laurens, Alberto & Diego Giacometti, and the painters Salvador Dali, Filippo de Pisis, and Christian Béard. Terry, Rodocanachi, Bérard and Frank met with each other regularly, and in the course of interminable discussions that would last until long in the evening, they would be often joined by Giacometti, Dali or Crevel. An intimate of the Surrealists, Frank had since the early 1920s been amongst the most sought-after of Parisian decorators, supplying an intelligentsia that had included Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon. Always alert towards artistic innovation, Frank was amongst the first to recognize the talents of Brard, of Dali, and of Giacometti, and it was inevitable that towards the late 1920s, when he began his collaboration with Chanaux, he should invite his artistic associates to collaborate on his interior schemes. These artists chose to suppress their own distractions to willingly succumb to an artistic panorama of Frank's direction that engaged with an ethereal, archaic, absolute other-worldliness. Each of these artists was, however, able to offer a little of their own personalities to the environment. The soft azure tones of Christian Brard cultivated a gentle melancholia, displacing the real with the marvelous through his use of trompe l'oeil, his carpets or his screens. The painter strove to match the decorative aspirations of Frank by delivering sumptuous dcor through improbable or disconcerting means. If his Aubusson carpets intimated a taste for the operatic work, it was that the bright colors were stylishly woven, metaphorically, by a child with dirty hands. The architects Rodocanachi and Terry submitted re-imaginings of neoclassicism and the baroque through several furnishings and architectural schemes. Dali yielded to his paranoid delusions to create furniture and floor lamps. Giacometti dreamed up numerous objects in either plaster or bronze, including all types of lighting, vases, andirons and other small accessories, as well as creating the sublime bas-reliefs that Frank would integrate into his interiors. These precisely-rendered and oft-barely separable artistic flourishes contributed to the creation of a uniquely idiosyncratic decorative universe - marvelous, strange, and born from fantasy. As noted by the poet Roger Lannes: "The décor that surrounds a theatre stage isolates it from the world. Better, it represents the last sensible place of a world that has, all of a sudden, disappeared. A room by Jean-Michel Frank is staged in the same way. It is closed, installed. And its inhabitants are all aboard, protected, immunized, briefly spared the deluge (...) But there remains at the heart this primitive singularity, and the ghosts and delusions are never far - Giacometti's figures are the masks behind which fades the face from the light, the specters of Salvador Dali lurk in the geometries of a screen, only to stream forth, like insects, the instant the panels are unfolded, and upon the sand Christian Bérard places shipwrecked humanity. It is with thanks to Jean-Michel Frank that our era henceforth looks in on itself" cf. LANNES, Roger, "Exégèse poétique de Jean-Michel Frank", Art et Décoration, January, 1939, p.15.

JEAN-MICHEL FRANK (1895-1941)

TWO CHAIRS AND A STOOL, 1939

Details

JEAN-MICHEL FRANK (1895-1941)
TWO CHAIRS AND A STOOL, 1939
en suite, ebonized wood and rush
armchair and side chair: 35 in. (89 cm.) high, stool: 19½ in. (50 cm.) high, 15¾ in. (40 cm.) square
armchair and stool stamped Chanaux & Co., Made in France, J.M. Frank and respectivly numbered 19925, 19928, the side chair stamped Made in France, CCie, J.M.F. and numbered 19926 (3)

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Lot Essay

cf. P.-E. Martin-Vivier, Jean-Michel Frank, New York, 2006, p. 332 for an armchair of another model.
This lot is sold with a certificate of authenticity from the Comité Jean-Michel Frank.

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