Cartier Rose Colored Glasses

Born in Buenos Aires, Nestor Perkal lives and works in Paris. Although he trained as an architect, his work has always been oriented to design and interior architecture. In 1985, Perkal founded an international design gallery in Paris, l’Espace Nestor Perkal, where he was among the first in Europe to show and sell pieces from the “New International Design” movement: Memphis Milano, Mariscal and many others.

From 1987 to 1994, Perkal was the artistic director of Algorithme — a goldsmith — where he invited many designers to work on edition projects that were highly successful in France and abroad. As a designer, Perkal has collaborated with Drimmer, Lou Fagotin, Artcodif, Veronese, etc. At CIRVA (International Research Centre on Glass and Plastic Arts), he created the Miroirs collection between 1994 and 1996.

As an interior architect, Perkal has furnished the café of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, different areas for Cartier and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, as well as many private apartments and houses. He has been the curator and scenographer of exhibitions held at the Cartier Foundation (La vie en Roses, 1998), at the Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris (“chez Valentin 2000”), at the Passage de Retz (Paris, 2000), at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rochechouart and the Grand Hornu in Belgium for the exhibition Désirs d’Objets (2003–04) and the Museum des Arts Décoratifs, Paris for the exhibition "Editer le design" (2006) and 100% Finlandia (2008). Perkal has been the director of the Research Centre on the Arts of Fire and Earth (CRAFT) of Limoges (1993–2009), developing strong and lively projects aimed at creating an experimental and artistic connection between industrialists and designers, architects and artists.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.