Wartime Gilt: French Furniture of the '40s - exhibit of French furniture made just before, during, and after World War II

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by Michele C. Cone

As France continues to rethink its recent past, an exhibition outside Paris provided an unprecedented look at the decorative arts of this troubled and controversial decade.

Boulogne, a Paris suburb bordering the Bois de Boulogne, is best known today for its elegant Art Deco homes, for its right-wing politicians and, since last year, for a museum celebrating 1930s Return-to-Order painting and sculpture (Le Musee des annees 30). Recently, Boulogne's Centre Culturel mounted an ambitious temporary exhibition, "Les Decorateurs des armies 40," that sought to examine and rehabilitate a little-known period in the French decorative arts. Devoted to sumptuous-looking furniture and home accessories made in France shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, the show presented ensembles by 21 decorators who either opposed functionalism from the start--Gilbert Poillerat, Serge Roche and Dolt (Pierre Dariel), among others--or who veered away from it in the 1930s and early '40s--most notably, Jacques Adnet and Jean-Charles Moreux.

Spread over two floors of the Centre Culturel--a high-ceilinged modern building with a grand staircase and circular loggia--were many pieces of furniture never before seen by the public, some of them grouped to re-create their original setting, others deservedly alone in a bay of their own. Despite the straitened circumstances under which they were made, these objects emanate self-confidence, freely embracing unusual materials, bold forms, frank color and a lightheartedness that was emphatically out of tune with its context, particularly during the Vichy years (1940-44).[1] That this exhibition came about at all is in large part due to the new willingness of France to confront--in this case without contrition--the disasters of Vichy.

No doubt contributing to the upbeat feeling of the show was the kitsch character of many of the pieces, particularly those in wrought iron by Gilbert Poillerat and Raymond Subes. The former's baroque dining table on a hunting theme offers an especially arresting example of such flamboyance. This extraordinary piece, with its supports in the form of bucrane (deer skulls and antlers), knotted ropes and chains, and a tree branch--all in wrought iron--was fabricated during the war and finished with secondhand materials. Although this table, with a design evocative of Nazi taste, was reproduced in the catalogue of the 1945 exhibition "Formes d'aujourd'hui," its whereabouts were long unknown. It recently turned up in the possession of Roche, whose bric-a-brac imagination rivaled Poillerat's own.

The use of wrought iron in the decorative arts of this period well illustrates the wartime scarcity of materials. This ordinary metal was often gilded, as in the legs of a marble-topped console by Poillerat, or treated like bronze to give the appearance of opulence, as in a pair of floor candleholders by Subes. Other times it was tempered with historical quotation, as in Rene Prou's pair of armchairs in white wrought iron with yellow cushions, where the curlicued armature ironically echoes a Louis XVI original.

The show offered many other quotations, from a mixture of periods and styles. Marc du Plantier's dining room draws from both Ancient Egypt (for the hieratic chairs) and Pompeii (for the murals, with their clothed and nude figures on a bare ground). The consoles and sideboards with aged mirror that both Roche and Dolt designed evoke a Baroque and decadent Venice. And the high-hack seats adorned with Aubusson tapestry by Andre Arbus, Jacques Quinet and Adnet have a pompous classical French look reminiscent of the Louis XIV era.

Arbus flirted with a variety of French period styles, only to veer away from quotation after the war, when he produced for his daughter a combination desk and easel in blond sycamore, shown at the Salon des artistes decorateurs in 1947. His 1943 chest in sycamore with musical-instrument designs, parchment and gold leaf evokes a refined though unnameable past. Emilio Terry, lacking a precedent for his surreal variations on the common chair, claimed he had invented the Louis XVII style, named after the so-called lost dauphin, the young son and heir to the throne of Louis XVI who died in prison under mysterious circumstances during the Revolution.

Color played an important role in French furniture of the '40s, and red was the color of choice for seats and sofas with curving, baroque backs in a variety of materials. Examples in the show included Maurice Jallot's rococo causeuse (settee-for-two) in tapestry, Rene Drouet's 1938 leather-and-wrought-iron banquette shaped like a pair of red lips a la Man Ray, Dolt's 1938 sofa in red satin, and Terry's 1948 lacquered-wood bridge chairs with curvaceous red and black backs shaped like the four playing-card suits. Red or tawny leather was the hallmark of sporty armchairs, a desk and telephone-table tops designed by Paul Dupre-Lafon, mostly dated after the war. Red leather appeared on sideboards and consoles, such as the 1942 bar a liqueur by Maxime Old, the 1945 console with leather doors and a wrought-iron base by the house of Dominique, and Adnet's rectangular sideboard cased in leather with gilded wrought-iron hinges by Poillerat, ca. 1939.