Rare 'En Forme' Desk, circa 1949

Charlotte Perriand’s earliest expressions of free-form design do not originate with her architecture or design work, but with her innovative photography of the early 1930s. A creative polymath, Perriand propagated the seeds of International Modernism as a genius in the atelier of Le Corbusier, advancing an agenda of pure geometries. However, her eye was continually on nature and she could surely sense the human desire for asymmetry and natural form. In 1933, Charlotte Perriand photographed isolated bones and rocks alongside details of windswept snow and manmade objects displaying their acquiescence to nature’s forces. These early artistic observations were unquestionably a stepping stone to the free-form furniture that emerges in 1938. She built a six sided, asymmetric pine wood table for her own apartment, appearing as a weathered fragment of ancient indigenous architecture. The design is not expressive solely for the sake of expression; function and form are purpose-built to accommodate seating in a compact space, allowing diverse seating arrangements and a free flow of movement in the remaining part of the room.

The edges and surface of this table and other works that emerged in the 1930s are sensual, warm, rustic and humane. They invite touch and their welcoming materiality encourages productivity. Perriand becomes Perriand, free of the dogma of her collaborator and erstwhile mentor Le Corbusier. Expressive and freely flowing designs become a staple in her oeuvre as bespoke tables and desks for willing clients and groundbreaking exhibitions around the globe.

“There is art in everything, whether it be an action, a vase, a saucepan, a glass, a piece of sculpture, a jewel, a way of being.” –Charlotte Perriand

In 1946, Georges Blanchon endeavored to produce a series of designs by Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand for the reconstruction era as World War II came to an end. Perriand’s free-form desk for Blanchon’s L’Equipment de la Maison was the most expressive and costly of these idealized designs conceived to populate homes in the post-war period. Intended to be practical furniture for mass production, the series struggled to even receive a single order in the first year. Each work was made “at an ancient pace” entirely by hand with traditional construction techniques and no visible hardware, evocative of rustic furniture. The hand-made quality was free of the mechanical rigidity of machine-cut wood and the harsh lines of a machine. The desk is as rigorous as a modernist building but as sensual as a drawing, inviting touch and an extra-sensory functionality. Slabs of solid ash are utilized for the legs and the organically shaped top features a trim of wood delineating the perimeter for durability. Two suspended drawers are an orthogonal counterpoint to the design, combining solid wood and sheet aluminum that is slotted into a groove of the wooden side panels. The drawers are not concealed within a massive cabinet as most desks of this era were, but rather a kinetic compositional element to the cohesive, sculptural whole. Charlotte Perriand’s artistic genius is clearly expressed in this rare masterwork, retaining the elegant simplicity of the natural subjects captured in her camera lens in the early 1930s.