Defended by internationally renowned Parisian merchants like the Vallois, Art Deco furniture is now a classic. Its simple lines had attracted new enthusiasts in the 1980s such as director Claude Berri, now deceased, or businessman François Pinault.
But it is especially at the turn of the XXIe century that prices explode. An armchair with dragons by Eileen Gray (1878-1976) won in 2009 the record of 21.9 million euros in the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint-Laurent sale, at Christie’s. A peak that no Art Deco object has reached since. Today, masterpieces are rare. The younger wealthy prefer post-war industrial furniture. Christie’s is not without hope that these new collectors are interested in modernist Art Deco, still little known.
On October 7, the auction house disperses the collection of seventy pieces of furniture by the architect-decorator Pierre Chareau (1883-1950). A first: never have so many works by this creator of the interwar period appear on the market as a whole. But the interest of the event is mainly due to the aura of the house which, until April, housed them: the Glass House, in Paris. A manifesto that this building has been hidden since 1932 behind a porte-cochère on rue Saint-Guillaume. From the outside, a facade entirely paved with glass bricks. Inside, free volumes without concrete walls.
Animated mechanisms
Less famous than Le Corbusier (1887-1965), its author, Pierre Chareau, is an unclassifiable dandy, with a brief but intense career, with a concise work – barely three or four buildings – but revolutionary. Founding member of the Union of Modern Artists in 1929 – of which he was more sympathetic than militant – he espouses the plea for a stripped and social art. The credo of the “Moderns”? Wrestle “Against the“ it makes you rich ”or the“ it looks good ”and the“ it comes from grandmother ””. Like his comrades, Chareau aspires to an art for all. But like them, he produced furniture that was certainly refined, but exceptional, for wealthy clients and patrons, like the couple Annie and Jean Dalsace, who commissioned the Glass House from him.
Chareau structures its furniture as well as its buildings, erasing any decorative element. Animated by mechanisms, they unfold in space. The tables are nesting, the pedestal tables open like a fan, the desks have pivoting shelves, such as this secretary’s desk proposed by Christie’s, estimated at 200,000 euros. Although a follower of modern doctrines, Chareau does not deny luxury or comfort. The shimmering colors of Jean Lurçat’s tapestries warm a basket sofa, estimated at 70,000 euros. Chareau does not choose his woods at random either, often preferring the warm tones of rosewood and amaranth coupled with hammered, patinated or polished iron by a genius blacksmith, Louis Dalbet.
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