Prouve Beatified - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2001 by Charlotte Ellis

Three complementary exhibitions of Jean Prouve's work are on show in Nancy, and various other tributes and celebrations are planned to mark the centenary of his birth. What is more , on certain afternoons until mid-October, it is possible to visit the house that Jean Prouve built at Nancy for and with his family in 1954.

A prodigious array of furniture is on show at Jean Prouve dans ses Meubles (Galeries Poirel, until 1 October). The sheer quantity of exhibits assembled from public and private collections in France and elsewhere allows for copious numbers of chairs, desks, beds, cupboards, shelf-units and tables produced by Prouve over several decades to be shown pell-mell in a large gallery. There is also plenty over for reconstructions of a study-bedroom of 1931 at Nancy University campus, a school classroom of 1950, the furniture Prouve displayed in his 'maison-coque' at the Arts Menagers exhibition of 1951 in Paris, and a study-bedroom of 1954 at Antony University campus.

As with furniture produced by Prouve, salvaged building components be had a hand in designing or making and indeed whole structures or what survives of them, are now considered eminently collectable. Nine such relics have been herded into the Parc de la Pepiniere and penned up for their own protection to make the open-air exhibition Jean Prouve' se met au Vert(until 15 October).

Placed at one entrance to the park like a free-standing sculpture is the slightly rusted folded steel skeleton of the entrance canopy made at Prouve's Maxeville workshops in 1952-53 for the Social Security office at Le Mans (demolished 1997). At another park entrance, you are greeted by a structure installed at Orly airport in 1961 to contain turnstiles where the public paid 2 francs to watch aeroplanes from the roof terrace.

Huddled around a recently regilded Louis XV bandstand are several structures scarred and eroded by decades of over-use: the remnants of one of the demountable temporary houses made for the homeless of Lorraine in 1945 (in this case not finally dismantled until 1992), one of 300 demountable huts produced for the army in 1939 (this one was subsequently re-used as a factory gatehouse until 1980) and a petrol station kiosk of 1952. Other survivals ripped from the jaws of the crusher are a couple of monocoque roof bays made in 1953, a fragment from the Nancy architecture school space-deck roof of 1969 (demolished 1996) and a very incomplete motorway service station structure of 1971. Each exhibit has a huge illustrated information board,

Jean Prouve (1901-1984) at the Musee des Beaux-Arts (until 15 October) claims to tackle 'all aspects of his talent and personality', starting with the influence of his father and godfather, the artists Victor Prouve and Emile Galle, both of whom were closely involved with the vigorous local flowering of Art Nouveau known as the Ecole de Nancy.

After training as a blacksmith and a statutory period of military service, Prouve set up his first workshop at Rue du General Custine in Nancy in 1924. There, he worked at the anvil on early commissions such as the ironwork tomb gate with decorative foliage on display. He soon increased his technical scope by acquiring electric welding equipment. Contacts with Parisian architects and designers led to increasingly wide-ranging commissions and, in 1931, he moved to larger workshops, at the Rue des Jardiniers in Nancy.

By the end of the decade, he was involved in such seminal building projects as the Maison du Peuple at Clichy. These developments, the hiatus of the war and Prouve's activities as Mayor of Nancy at the Liberation are evoked by a selection of archive documents, drawings, photographs and publications, and by such artefacts as a demountable window-wall unit of 1935, and furniture made at various dates, with or without input from other designers. Particularly poignant are war-time bicycles with folded steel frames and a detachable trailer, produced in Prouve's s workshops in the early 1940s.

The exhibition then moves on to the celebrated workshops that Prove created at Maxeville in 1947, his severance from them in 1953 and his subsequent work as a consultant and teacher. A baffling tableau composed mainly of furniture and scale models may, or may not, be intended to evoke Prouve's office at Maxeville. Other exhibits include the 74 board-mounted information sheets about industrialised building methods compiled at Maxeville for the 1953 CIAM, archive drawings and photographs of buildings and projects supplemented by recent scale models and colour photographs, row upon row of slightly battered prefabricated panels salvaged from several different buildings and a facsimile blackboard bearing Prouve's lecture diagrams in simulated chalk. This last forms the backdrop for a video of Prouve in conversation. Yet towards the end of the itinerary, it becomes increasingly difficult to detect any underlying thread other than the view so cogently expressed by Reyner Banham in AR April 1962: 'Too often, if the appearance of the buildings is to be taken as evidence, a sigh of relief must have run around the drawing office when someone uttered the magic formula "Laissons les facades a Prouve" and shrugged off half the building... Quite apart from questions of avoiding just responsibility, this is no way to get the best out of the man.' One can only conclude that this exhibition amounts to a kind of national beatification of a Prouve portrayed (to misquote General De Gaulle's words at the Liberation of Paris) as: Prouve out rage, Prouve brise, Prouve martyrise - mais Prouve eternel.