Portfolios

Analysis of works and conception: Denis DORIA

Participants: Raphaèle BILLÉ, Sophie HESSEL

Photography: Ecl’Art

Print run: 1,000 copies

Each portfolio includes:

40 pages of text, divided into 3 books,

61 colour plates of which 3 recto-verso

Format: 29,7 cm x 24 cm

Printed in: July 2001

Publisher: GALERIE DORIA

1, rue des Beaux-Arts – 75006 PARIS.

ISBN 2-9517172-0-2

Retail Price incl. tax: € 450

This portfolio fully reproduces Pierre Chareau’s collection of personal drawings, even those that he took with him when he went to New York in 1940, that he preserved carefully throughout his life, adding two projects carried out in the United States.

The collection of 61 drawings, the largest collection of Chareau’s drawings still existing today, lets us retrace his whole career, since the opening of his Parisian workshop in 1919, at 54 rue Nollet, until his death in New York in 1950. Our publication follows the exhibition of drawings which took place at the Galerie from 18^th May to 28^th July 2001. They correspond to the concern to preserve the memory of the collection with a wider circle of enthusiasts, before the collection was dispersed.

This portfolio draws up the inventory of a collection of documents that we have studied, analysed, tidied and classified by subject type (collection perspectives, furniture items, light fittings) and the technique employed (pencil, pastel, ink, watercolour or gouache on tracing paper or regular paper).

Rich with information, these drawings show us his creative process for the first time and give us a glimpse of the work of preparation by comparison of the different stages of creation, from the sketch to perspectives showing the final result. Because, right from the start of his career, Pierre Chareau envisaged the interior design of a space in a holistic manner, treating the building and the furniture as a collection formed from the same construction principles.

His talents as an artist stand out, but also all the interest that he had for drawing, for line, for proportion and for harmonising colours.

These works bear witness to Pierre Chareau’s research towards a furniture more adjusted to the needs of its time, where movement, actual or symbolic, establishes itself as a fundamental criterion: very early on, he was placing retractable boards in the bodies of desks, designing handkerchief tables and nested tables. From 1923, the fan, the moving triangle, found a place of choice among his creations.

Similarly, certain basic forms recurred and constituted his special creative vocabulary.

The images are added to by facsimiles of manuscripts and texts from Dollie Chareau, and from his friends and colleagues at the UAM: René Herbst and Francis Jourdain.