Portfolios

This publication is the third volume of the portfolio collection, launched with two previous volumes devoted to the work of Pierre Chareau. Volume III is focused this time on the work of the interior designer and furniture creator Francis Jourdain (1876-1958).

A multidisciplinary artist, Francis Jourdain was, at the same time an interior designer, a creator of furniture and a theoretician. Leader of the French modernist movement of the first half of the twentieth century, both the man and his work were admired by the most important writers, artists and creators of the era, who were his colleagues and his friends. In 1929, a founding member of the UAM (Union of Modern Artists) alongside Robert Mallet-Stevens, René Herbst, Raymond Templier and Hélène Henry among others, Francis Jourdain had implemented new concepts in interior designer and furniture from 1909 and established himself as one of the instigators of the French modernist movement.

Based on prolific and unpublished photographic documentation, this publication constitutes an essential tool for the analysis of his work. It is the result of more than twenty years of research and the fruit of constant attention applied to his work.

Over the years, the creator’s most significant works have passed through our hands; we could observe them and study them, their physical presence allowing us to make new discoveries and to approach the particularities of his work in a new light.

Thanks to the implementation of a strict protocol of photographic registration of each of these pieces, a considerable amount of information could be gathered, inventoried and stored. With time, we were able to form a rich database, taking into account the material form of each piece and the elements it comprises.

Form, construction, volume and function are the central threads of this pathway whose aim was to prepare a detailed portrait of each creation by putting the works into perspective.

From his first outfitting projects, Francis Jourdain established himself as one of the key figures of the French modernist movement. Precursor to a furniture that extends architecture and coming from the same construction principles; Jourdain would invent furniture accessible to all budgets. Committed and radical for more humanism, Jourdain implemented in his research, the principles that he recommended. He wanted to work for a democratisation of “intelligent” furniture and to make it accessible to as many people as possible. With this in mind, he designed several collections of “interchangeable” furniture, some of which were sold by simple subscription and combinable furniture, which adapted easily to all surface areas and integrated into interior spaces as genuine extensions of the architecture.

Preoccupied by the decluttering of spaces which he called “démeublement” (“defurnishing”), Jourdain would adhere to designing furniture and interiors which rested on an equilibrium between rationalisation of form and the use of high-quality materials. An approach which progressively led him to remove any decoration not linked to function and which became the sign of his work.

The selection of works, presented in this publication, covers a large part of Francis Jourdain’s furniture creations. An ideal exhibition, in a way, in which the images – proposed for interpretation according to two broad themes: Construction and Function – allow us to see the extent, diversity and coherence of the creator’s stylistic vocabulary.