Furniture of artist

History

the Middle Ages at the 18th century, the design of furniture is the reserved domain of the craftsmen. In 1789, the obligation to hold a control to realize meublesconsidérée like a privilege and an obstacle with individual freedom, is abolished. At the 19th century the cabinet work perdure, through four great styles: Style Worsens, Style Restoration, Style Louis-Philippe and Style Napoleon III. The techniques of manufacture change under the effect of the industrial growth. The taste evolves/moves, marquetry is employed, the lines are purified.

It is necessary to reach the apogee of the Industrial revolution (about 1870), so that the industrialists themselves start to be interested in furniture. The techniques of production pass from an artisanal system of production, in dispersed places, with an increasingly mechanized and centralized production, in series, using standards in order to obtain a homogeneous quality.

The debate begins then between holding of technology and industry and those which defend a line historicist and the beauty of the single object. This polemic will continue throughout the 20th century.

At the same time, the artists free from the Academism in particular with the impressionists with the living room of 1874. Released of the esthetic and technical constraints, the field of application of the artists increases. So that the painters and sculptors will also create furniture, the movable of artist .

Design

Furniture today is often included by the term “Design”. The design, appeared with the wire of the 20th century, is a complex concept.

If one refers to the definition of Raymond Guidot according to whom the design is “the share of creation ensuring coherence between the technological requirements of manufacture, the internal structure of the object, its value of use and its final aspect”, the furniture of artist does not concern, a priori, the field of the design. The criterion of functionality is not a major element in the creation of the artist. The artist wishes above all to be able to express itself by the means of his creation.

The Advent of the furniture of artist

The decorative artists plastics technicians and arts at the beginning of the 20th century

The freedom acquired by the impressionists leads at the beginning of the 20th century with the emergence of esthetic currents where the artist becomes multi-field. Its statute evolves/moves. The difference in the previous century, art does not obey any more the rules of the Academism. The painter is not worried any more to represent reality. Several factors are in question the such appearance of the Photographie or the massive diffusion of the Gravure S.

The artists also profit from the technical evolutions since the industrial revolution (colors out of tubes). Works do not require any more one hard preparation, leaving more place to spontaneousness. The whole of these phenomena increases the creativity of the artists, who multiply their techniques. Their curiosity leads them to create objects and pieces of furniture.

The group Nabi S whose concern was to find the crowned character of the painting, attaches an importance to the construction of the table which goes hand in hand with a marked taste of the decorative one, which carries out them to create tapestries, ceramics or stage sets. Paul Gauguin, parallel to its pictorial work, creates objects such as ceramics and woodcarvings. Maurice Denis conceives the whole of the vault contiguous to its residence of the Priory paintings, the stained glasses and the pieces of furniture are of its creation.

Pablo Picasso is interested in decorative arts. It carries out costumes, ceramics, sculptures. For his friend Serge Diaghilev, it carries out in 1917 the costumes of Parade, celebrates it Russian ballet. Picasso also conceives the whole of the decoration and the curtain of scene. In 1946, at the time of one of its stays in the South, it sees a ceramics exposure to Vallauris, which produces at his place a catch. It meets Suzanne and Georges Ramie, owners of the Madoura workshop, and decides to attack this discipline. It settles even in Vallauris between 1948 and 1955. Inventive, it will carry out in a score of years approximately 3500 original parts.

The technical and artistic upheavals which took place at the 19th century generated a new vision of decorative arts which will support the exchanges between arts

First achievements of the furniture of artist

Art nouveau

Towards 1880, the Art nouveau makes watch of a creative audacity for easy and reduced customers. The school of Nancy, core of the Art nouveau, diversifies in decorative arts: ceramics, glass and furniture. The decorative repertory is primarily borrowed floral world. This last is not stylized any more but naturalist. The curved lines are privileged. It is also inspired by the Symbolisme illustrated by Stephan Mallarmé in literature and by Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau in painting.

Hector Guimard, Emile Galle, Strong Eugene and Louis Majorelle are the main actors of the furniture known as of Art nouveau.

The Marquetry japonisante, watch taste for exoticism, the vegetable world. The piece of furniture is a “decorative” surface like a table.

Galle draws the flowers, the plants, the birds and the insects of Lorraine to be inspired some in creation by his pieces of furniture. For Emile Galle, the decoration “will have expression because the artist in contact with nature, cannot remain insensitive with the nobility of the vital forms (...) this art will be sincere, merry, full with natural health, alive, human, true or will not be”.

The actors of the art nouveau are multi-field: Hector Guimard, conceives the near total of the decoration of the buildings which it constructs as an architect. The Castel Béranger is a homogeneous work, where the interior architecture and external are answered. With this intention the architect, had to devote himself to a field which did not belong to him hitherto: furniture. It brings a new glance there on the cabinet work, even if it does not break completely with the tradition. It designs the handles of door, the sofa, the luminaries… It creates a universe with whole share. The Utopia of “art in all” is present in its work. The artists Art nouveau, just like those of the Bauhaus, inaugurate the dream where all would be art, where the least object would raise an esthetic concern which would legitimate it.

Guimard also carried out the urban Mobilier (bench, luminary, subway station) of the town of Paris. There still remains about it some vestiges particularly the mouths of subway like that of the station Sevres-Babylon.

The influence of the Bauhaus

It was founded with Weimar, in Germany in 1919, by a group of varied artists. This institution gathers architects of which Walter Gropius, painters such Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee. Many historians regard this group as the “key” of the design. Decorative arts mix truly with the design.

The SAD, Company of the artists decorators, plays a determining role in France to bind the artists to decorative arts. Founded in 1901, by Rene Guillère, the purpose of it is to support collaboration between the artists and the industrialists, by thus supporting decorative arts. It is at the origin in 1920 of the style Art déco which perdure until in 1939.

Marcel Duchamp of the group Hobby-horse, puts the object on a pedestal in 1917 with its Urinal become a work aside whole, it is the invention of the “Ready made”. The object, as consumer goods will also take an important place in the movement Pop Art in the Sixties.

For surrealist (of 1924 at the end of the years 1950) the question of the object and thus of furniture is a considerable concern in their work.

As of the Forties, in withdrawal compared to the functionalist movement of furniture (1945-1970), one sees appearing major artists like Alexandre Noll or Diego Giacometti.

Alexandre Noll chooses wood like means of expression and passes from the object to the piece of furniture. In 1943, it presents its pieces of furniture to the company of French arts.

Diego Giacometti work near his/her brother Alberto. From 1929, it carries out various objects and luminary for Jean Michel Franck and carries out pieces of furniture for Mrs. Maeght for Saint-Paul de Vence. But it is only in 1966 that it carries out all the other pieces of furniture characterized by a line gracile, incorporating sculptures vegetable and animal, very near to the style of his/her brother.

It is also as from the Sixties, that the sculptor François Xavier Lalanne starts to carry out “animal” pieces of furniture. Ludic, the artist creates a fantastic space grace his sheep stool or his bar-ostriches, first pieces of furniture sculptures.

The furniture of artist saw his apogee only with the new realistic ones, about 1960. Arman, Yves Klein, César, Niki de Saint Phalle carry out pieces of furniture in “limited edition” thanks to the financing of Artcurial in 1975. They are prolongations of the work of the artist. The violins cut out of Arman are covered with a plate with glass and form a table. César exploits its technique of the expansion to create a sofa (a specimen is with the State-owned furniture), Niki de Saint Phalle creates tables.

In the Eighties, the furniture of artists is diffused. The artists of the Sixties, multiply their productions thanks to the editions. These artists produce still today.

Other share, the design leaves the Fonctionnalisme: Alessandro Mendini preaches “the decorative one” and Ettore Sottsass founds in 1981 the Groupe of Memphis, which grants an important place to the “plastic values, symbolic systems and ludic”.

Current artists

According to Adolf Loos, theorist of art, “the amalgam of art and objects of use the greatest humiliation which one can inflict with art”. Nevertheless, since the 20th century, the artists questioned the nature of the work of art and called into question the traditional codes of Beautiful arts.

Consequently, the object is naturally put in the middle of their concerns. When Marcel Duchamp sets up a urinal or a carry-bottle in work of art (Fountain 1917 and Porte Bottle 1914), it adapts the object, kidnaps it at its ends to divert it its function first, commonplace and inaugurates the objet trouv3e.

Many artists will wonder thereafter about the statute of the object like Arman with its accumulations, or César and its compressions, Jean Tinguely and his sculptures created with objects of recoveries, or Joseph Beuys with his piano covered with felt and Bertrand Lavier with work refrigerator and washing machine.

Currently, one notes a bringing together between the design and art, at the same time the designers turn to the visual arts, and the artists direct themselves towards the design. Several exposures proposed the crossing of these disciplines.

The diverted piece of furniture of its function

The design, is interested in the function of furniture, and, integrates it in a marketing policy and industrial. The artist who diverts the function of furniture frees from the usual notion of furniture, and adapts his form and the universe to which it returns.

Released works of their statute of autonomous object, assert their membership of the real-world. Julie Pellegrin, police chief of the exposure “Interior Day”, defines these pieces of furniture as “object-works” which “suggest more than they do not prescribe, of the assumptions of use that the spectator is free to define”. Many artists play of this ambivalence of their works such Kim Hamisky which uses the piece of furniture to create sculptures (“enrubannée” Coffee table 1982), the piece of furniture like is handicapped of its function, but it has an obvious esthetic value.

In the United Kingdom, the artist John Angelo Benson, in the series “The Benson Collection off Corrupted Classic” of 2003, (litt. The traditional ones corrupted of the Benson collection), diverts pieces of furniture “headlights” of the 20th century, in particular the armchair Barcelona of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe of 1929 qu' it equips with peaks and entitles The Mies Lobby Trap , (the trap of the Lobby).

The subject becomes movable

Contrary, the subject can become movable. Thus, it becomes functional and usual. The interest of this work is that the subject becoming an object of use, it approaches the man. Its owner passes from the statute of spectator to that of user, his report/ratio with work becomes more intimate.

One can imagine that a unit as this one creates a fantastic imaginary place where the traditional and functional objects disappeared. The illusion belongs to the work of the artist because it is constrained to allot a function to the object without encroaching on its form and its esthetic character. Lalanne in their residence of Ury, created an extraordinary universe with sculptures of Francois, Xavier Lalanne.

Other share with the difference of “the craftsman of art”, the artist wishes to convey a message. The furniture limited up to now to the functionality and beautiful, can take a direction. The artist gives a “intelligentsia” to the piece of furniture.

The new realistic ones regularly transform their subject into piece of furniture. The tables of Niki de Saint Phalle are the obvious result of its work of sculptor, they are Nanas carrying a plate.

In the Seventies, the furniture of artist took organic, or anthropomorphic forms.

Guy de Rougemont (born in 1935) in the beginning painter and sculptor, is devoted to furniture since 1970. Its most known table is out of plexiglass and brushed steel, its title coffee table cloud is inspired by its form. The artist thus explains his step “I came to the pieces of furniture because I wanted to give a function to volumes of sculptor, but while always trying to keep a certain ambiguity to them; function or not function? ” (Guy de Rougemont).

Ruth Francken realizes in 1970, the first edition of famous “the Seat sculpture”, which is neither more nor less than one body of moulded polyester man appearing a chair.

The furniture of artist in the market of art

The furniture of artist occupies in the market of art a singular place. Tending to appear like an anecdote in the career of the artist, it is also placed at the hinge between two fields which one often tries to dissociate; furniture and visual arts. However these works testify to a true communion. The furniture of artist thus constitutes a true crossroads of arts, which is also made feel in the diversity of the actors of the market of the art which takes part in this phenomenon.

Editors and Galleries

The editors are the first concerned. Except exception, the majority of the artists entrust the realization of the pieces of furniture to an editor. Edition taken of load by more and more of galleries. That allowing them to reduce their cost of purchase and to possibly emit councils on the realization of the project. The Artcurial gallery in 1975, was the first to make editions in particular with the new realistic ones: Arman, Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle.

The edition is regulated, (see article in appendix on the edition), indeed, the editor has to have “to proceed or make carried out the manufacture of work”, and to ensure the publication and the diffusion. The edition as in sculpture can be single, an original (legally, an original implies that there is less than 8 specimens) or in multiple. The selling price being naturally consequently. It is current also to make republications for a work which likes much.

The edition of art Indeed creates many controversies in the medium of Article, it rests the fundamental questions to which, it is incredible to be able to answer: What art? Can art it multiply? Is art it obligatorily single? The partisans of the “multiples” in art, have the same convictions as those of the design. They estimate that concretely nothing aesthetically differentiates the single part from a multiple. The advantages of the multiple are numerous, on the one hand more the object is published less it is expensive, so that it are diffused more easily. The circulation of the work of an artist is easier. The reproductions of work of art thus make it possible to make known with the greatest numbers work of an artist.

Nevertheless, too multiplied work, is appropriate to popularize it. The risk is to standardize the artist and cause a drop in his coast. This is why the editors generally choose a compromise. The work of the artist is produced at the same time in small series (less than 100 specimens for an international diffusion), and in single part.

Commercial diffusion (galleries, auctions)

There does not seem to be exclusive collector of furniture of artist. It attracts at the same time the amateurs of painting, sculpture and furniture or design. Other share, furniture having a dominant functional virtue, the furniture of artist makes it possible to diffuse art more easily.

On the level of the public sales, the furniture of artist is drowned in the sales of furniture or table. There is no yet established rule for this type of piece of furniture. If the artist is more known for his pictorial work, the furniture of artist is generally present in the sales of table.

The galleries specialized in the furniture of artist are very few, nevertheless the majority of the art galleries contemporary and design integrate this type of furniture of which the Perrotin gallery and the Kreo gallery of international reputes.

In addition, it is interesting to observe the name which one allots to the furniture of artist according to the place where it is diffused: one speaks about furniture or pieces of furniture of artists in the galleries of table and D art-design in the shops of design or the galleries of design; one can see there a certain claim on behalf of the respective fields.

The market of art also benefits from progress of Internet. The sites of the “on-line” galleries multiply, the sites of artists also, and the majority of the companies of designers have their own sites. The purchaser can have access directly to the sites of the editors. Works circulate better and does not pass inevitably between the hands of a galerist.

The representation of the furniture of artist

The furniture of artist within the institutions is present in the museums at the same time of visual art decorative and art. Called like known as previously art design sometimes, it makes it possible to make the footbridge between art and the design. Thus, it is a means to make discover with the general public amateur of Beautiful arts, the design, and vice versa.

The exposure “Crossed Lines, New territories off Design” of Barcelona, in 2003, then at the time of Lille 2004, “Open Borders”, the exposure of the FRAC Ile de France “Interior Day”, and that of the museum of Chateauroux, “the Pieces of furniture of Artist” show the interest of the institutions for this phenomenon. Nevertheless, the works dedicated to being used are also a means of inserting art in “the house”, the “trade”, or the “companies”.

Conclusion

Furniture always testified to the lifestyle of a company. The seats Style Louis XV, watch femininity and the preciosity of the 18th century, reserved for an elite, it are related to the label of the court and thus impose a certain behavior. Contrary, contemporary furniture (ex: Ikea) largely diffused, conceived by designers, returns to a more democratic and free company. The designed pieces of furniture adapt to our environment, they are light, sometimes which can be recycled, of matched colors. One can lose shape in the “poufs” vis-a-vis “a coffee table”. The artists take as a starting point their environment, vis-a-vis the development of the consumer society, the interest for furniture is legitimate.

At the beginning of the century, the furniture of artist made surface, thanks to the release acquired by the artists and with the desire to multiply the fields of application of Article technological advances supported the access to decorative arts. In addition, supported by the galerists and the editors, the artist is not constrained to take part in the manufacture of the object. Essence for the artist being the idea.

The presentation of the piece of furniture of artist on the contemporary artistic scene E tests the need to deliver an artistic message in reaction against the functional minimalism.

Olivier Urman and Carolyn Wittendal are artists of the same generation who start to be recognized. Their work around the piece of furniture reveals different aspects. For Urman, it is a question of proposing the disorders of the fonctionet behavior. Whereas for Wittendal, Show cow is a humorous “wink” on ecology, while keeping a usual function.

Wouldn't the furniture of artist, the art-design, be it not a means of reconciling art and the design? Through these works, the two fields are confused, the result is successful. To the manner of a designer Carolyn Wittendal binds the beautiful one to useful, while using its creation like means of expression.

For Claire Fayolle and Stéphanie Moisdon, journalists of Beautiful arts Magazine: “It is about a new form of art centered on the beauty at the same time a glance on consumption and a way assumed to break the taboo of the déco. ” The furniture of artist registers furniture as well as a work of Article.

According to Jean Bedel, “the relative success of the pieces of furniture sculptures answers the desire of the enlightened amateurs who give them a choice place in their livable space, qu even title as a work of Article This tendency aesthetician is not registered it not in the best French tradition which can as well appreciate the beauty of the forms for their functional success as for the elegance of their lines”

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