Perfection: Jean E. Puiforcat's designs for silver

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Gail S. Davidson

The French silversmith Jean E. Puiforcat ranks among the greatest twentieth-century designers of silver tabletop objects. His mathematically pure, smoothly polished forms, ornamented with semiprecious stones or wood embellishments, appeal to the intellect as well as the senses. Exquisite detailing, impeccable contours, and stunning color contrasts distinguish his silver objects from those of contemporary French silversmiths. Yet surprisingly little research has been devoted to this major innovator of modernist metalwork. This article draws on a collection of more than one hundred drawings, archival documents, and photographs by and relating to Puiforcat given to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York City in 1996 and considers how this material contributes to our knowledge of his career and the process by which he created his designs.

After distinguishing himself in the French army during World War I, Puiforcat entered the atelier of the family silver business headed by his father Louis Victor Puiforcat (c. 1867-1955). (The company still exists, owned since 1993 by the Hermes Group, Paris.) A shrewd businessman, Louis Victor understood that the conservative French market prized historical styles from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He collected more than three hundred masterpieces of historical French silver, which the company craftsmen used as a basis for new editions.' Training with this collection at hand, Jean Puiforcat developed a profound respect for simple, classical forms as well as for precise technical detailing.

Puiforcat began his professional career in 1920 at a critical time for French decorative arts. Reeling from the successful show of modem German furnishings at the 1910 Salon d'Automne in Paris, French critics challenged French designers to create affordable modern furniture and decorative arts that would restore the country's traditional leadership in design. (2)

In his debut at the twelfth annual Salon des Artistes Decorateurs in 1921, Puiforcat exhibited two silver and ivory tea and coffee services: one with a lobed, convex, melon-shaped body and auricular (ear-shaped) handle (Fig. 2), and the other with concave, faceted walls and C-shaped handle attached to the body at the upper joint (Fig. 1). The bulbous, simple shapes and limited ornament of these differ markedly from the elegantly contoured rococo-inspired services profusely decorated with chiseled ornament that the Puiforcat firm was then producing. (3)

Searching for something new, yet bearing the weight of tradition in his bones, Puiforcat's initial impulse led him to look backward in order to move forward. English silver from the second and third decades of the nineteenth century (Regency), especially services designed by William Beckford featuring a squat melon-shaped body with a stubby spout (PL IV) and melon-shaped teapots designed by Paul Storr (1771-1844) for Storr and Mortimer (1822-1838), which privileged form over linear decoration, provided one starting point. (4) The melon form also attracted silversmiths in restoration France (1815-1830), such as the Paris goldsmith Charles Nicolas Odiot, who combined the melon body with an auricular handle, which Puiforcat also used (see Fig. 2). (5) While borrowing from these or more likely from examples inspired by these models (or directly from the original source in Asian stoneware), Puiforcat changed the scale of decorative elements, broadening the melon sections to reinforce the spherical volume of the fo rms. (6)

The designer similarly found inspiring models in eighteenth-century French silver for the faceted design model number 7626 (Fig. 1). He must have also seen pieces like the art nouveau Maison Boucheron silver coffeepot shown in Plate V, whose concave faceted body and flat stylized plant ornament presents precedents for Puiforcat's design in Figure 1. In response to a design such as this, Puiforcat on his model exfoliated the applied ornament everywhere but the joints where the handle and spout met the body and the knob in the form of a small ivory and silver flower, thus asserting the solid form with its contrasts of light and shade. This sober floral ornamentation with relatively little interior chiseling also reflected Puiforcat's admiration for the simplified vegetal decoration on the silver of Georg Jensen (1866-1935). A sports trophy--a punch bowl and ladle (Fig. 3)--shown in the same 1921 Salon exhibition and documented in the Cooper-Hewitt's archival photographs, incorporates pendant grape clusters like those on many Jensen silver objects, albeit in ivory and much larger in scale. (7)

Between 1921 and 1924, Puiforcat explored different paths to achieve his goal of perfectly formed silver tablewares in the modern style. He continued investigating traditional forms using the reductive process, paring down any applied historicist or art nouveau vegetal ornament. In 1922 he showed a silver tea and coffee service with stunning lapis lazuli insulators, whose only plant ornament was a silver and lapis lazuli floral bud finial, or knob (P1. VIII). Using wider, more concave facets separated by sharp vertical creases created a stronger sense of plasticity, as well as more interesting effects of light and shadow.