Letter Rack by Jacques Adnet

One of the most elegant and innovative 20th-century French furniture designers, Jacques Adnet created a simple, unadorned signature style that is both trim and vigorous. He began his career in the heyday of the Art Deco era, and in the 1950s, in association with Hermès, created chairs, lamps, desks and other pieces that employed slender metal frames clad in stitched saddle leather. With such furnishings, Adnet brought a fashion sensibility to design and decor that had not been seen since the 1920s prime of the great Paris couturier-decorator Paul Poiret.

Adnet was born in a provincial town in Burgundy, where he studied design before moving, along with his twin brother, Jean, to Paris to study at the École des Arts Décoratifs. After their graduation in the early 1920s, the brothers were hired to work in the decorative-arts atelier of the department store Galeries Lafayette, under the direction of Maurice Dufrêne, an Art Deco master who developed a singularly robust and opulent style. Both Adnets showed their work at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes — the design fair from which the term Art Deco is derived. 

In 1928, Jacques Adnet took charge of the struggling La Compagnie des Arts Français, a decorative-arts firm founded by Louis Süe and André Mare that created modern furnishings that bore traces of 18th-century styling. Adnet immediately took the company in a different direction. He developed a simple lithe and lean look that incorporated industrial materials such as metal and glass, along with exotic woods and finishes such as parchment and sharkskin.

Adnet’s furniture begs to be described in terms of personalities: charming faux-bamboo side tables, suave chrome lighting and urbane club chairs. His most noted pieces, which feature sleek metal frames wrapped in Hermès leather, have a character all their own — smooth, elegant and self-assured, they inhabit a room with the same wit and grace as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve.

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Louis Süe was a man of many artistic talents who excelled in a range of disciplines in the Parisian design scene of the early 20th century. A painter, furniture maker, decorator and architect, Süe drew on traditional design but sought to make modernist work. This was especially true of his partnership with unsung French artist and textile designer André Mare, a pairing that gave way to the Compagnie des Arts Français.

Süe's best known furniture designs included wall mirrors, console tables and armchairs, and his interior designs spanned private residences and passenger liners. One of the most significant partnerships of Süe's career was with Mare, with whom Süe became acquainted while working at an interior design firm called L’Atelier Français.

In 1919–20, Süe and Mare, known as Süe et Mare, founded the Compagnie des Arts Français, which specialized in furniture, tapestries, wallpaper and silverware. The founders intended to draw on 18th-century furniture to create modern works — they were inspired by Cubism and Art Nouveau and produced forward-looking Art Deco designs that are widely celebrated today.

Inspired by the work of Austrian collective Wiener Werkstätte, Süe and Mare grew a successful business at the Compagnie des Arts Français, mass-producing furnishings and objects, taking on a range of wealthy clients and employing artists such as Marie Laurencin, Paul Vera and Fernand Léger (Mare and Léger had previously shared a studio). One of their interior design projects was the Polish Embassy in Paris. In 1925, Süe and Mare designed the Fontaine Cie Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, which featured works by André Groult, Maurice Dufrêne and others.

The Compagnie des Arts Français struggled financially toward the end of the 1920s and was sold to the owners of the French department store Galeries Lafayette. Jacques Adnet, who was working with Dufrêne at the decorative arts atelier of Galeries Lafayette, was appointed artistic director of the Compagnie and steered the firm in a different direction.

Enlisting innovative designers such as Charlotte Perriand, Suzanne Guiguichon, René Herbst and Francis Jourdain, Adnet developed a simple lithe and lean look that incorporated industrial materials including metal and glass, along with exotic woods and finishes such as parchment and sharkskin. He created furniture for iconic luxury house Hermès through the 1950s, and when the Compagnie des Arts Français closed its doors in 1959, Adnet took a job as the director of École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs.

In 2021, around 30 pieces of furniture by Süe et Mare from the estate of German-born fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld went to auction at Sotheby's. Many of Süe's designs are held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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