Important "Bibliotheque Murale,", ca. 1958
Oak, bent aluminum. 52 1/4 x 126 x 12 1/2 in. (132.7 x 320 x 31.8 cm). Produced by Les Ateliers Jean Prouvé for Galerie Steph Simon, France.

PROVENANCE Prouvé Family, Nancy, France; Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris; Steven Volpe Design, San Francisco, California
LITERATURE Charlotte Perriand and Fernand Leger, Charlotte Perriand, Fernand Leger, une connivence, Biot, 1999, pg. 59; Jacques Barsac, Charlotte Perriand-Un Art d'Habiter, Paris, 2005, pp. 420-425 for similar examples

Although never a couple, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé stood hand-in-hand at midcentury, the pragmatic parents of postwar modernism in France. Together they devised economic solutions to the problems of daily life in everyday places: dormitories, locker rooms, apartments, offices. Their unadorned furniture, built from wood, aluminum, and bent sheet steel, never sacrificed clarity for decoration, "but its construction is so powerful that it imposes itself in space like sculpture," as fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa observed of Prouvé's work. (Laurence Bergerot, Patrick Seguin, Jean Prouvé, Paris, 2007, vol. 1, p. 23) Longtime friends, the two designers formalized their relationship in 1952 at the behest of gallerist Steph Simon. That year and the next, they collaborated on furniture—bookshelves, tables, beds—for the student bedrooms of the Maison de la Tunisie and Maison du Mexique at Cité Universitaire, Paris. In both residences, each room was dominated by a large bookcase whose wide plank shelves were joined by staggered aluminium casiers, or 'pigeonholes,' fashioned from bent aluminum. The present "Bibliothèque murale" owes its design to those previous examples and to an earlier bookcase, with wood blocks in place of aluminum ones, designed by Perriand in 1940 and later produced for L'Équipment de la Maison. "Are we going to have mass or void?" asked Perriand in her autobiography Une Vie de Création (The Monacelli Press, New York, 2003). With its energetic interplay of forms in space, "Bibliothèque murale" achieves both.