EDITIONS OF LA MARTINIÈRE
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SelectionFrom Andrée Putman, “high priestess of decoration”, to Djo-Bourgeois, forgotten creator of the Roaring Twenties, from Vera Székely and her “armed sails” to Japanese designers, these four beautiful books will delight both enlightened amateurs and neophytes.
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Two women, one French, the other Hungarian, who left their mark on interior architecture; a creator of the Roaring Twenties fallen into oblivion; then a country, Japan, which in a few decades has become the undisputed master of design … Four beautiful books to read like novels.
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Andrée Putman, the lady in black and white
It reads like a novel and for good reason: the subject, Andrée Putman (1925-2013), is in itself an epic figure. Tall, with a conquering blonde lock, she fell into design at the age of 50, to become in a flash the most famous woman interior designer in the world. She is credited with the invention of the “so chic” black and white checkerboard – from one of Karl Lagerfeld’s many apartments that she decorated, to the Morgans Hotel in New York, the starting point of her international career. -, and that of a French style, combining sober lines and mastic colors. Andrée Putman was also the first to bring Art Deco up to date with the reissues, through her house Ecart International, of furniture by Jean-Michel Frank or Eileen Gray, which she considered to be the “Goddess of her professional life”. A challenge that she took up at the dawn of the 1980s when the fashion was with the exuberant and playful design of the Italian Memphis movement.
But this is not a hagiography devoted to “High priestess of decoration” written by the author, Sylvie Santini, a former journalist at L’Express then to Paris Match. It is an investigation that reveals the story of a “Beautiful ugly, as we said of Gertrude Stein”, a stylist “Socialite who has forged an allure, presence and an international brand in the manner of a Karl Lagerfeld”, she specifies to World. With earthy formulas and good words, she describes this “Defrocked musician inducted into Coco Chanel of design”, a “Mutic ex-young girl turned into a senior night-clubbeuse”, a heartless dilettante, “Narcissus incapable of loving”. Behind the hoarse voice and the androgynous body of Andrée Putman is revealed in fine a woman who is looking for herself, a lonely bourgeois who gets dizzy in nightclubs, partying. “Because I didn’t do it when I was 20”, she specified. A character as black and white as the colors with which she dressed her walls.
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