Jacques Adnet Pair of Parchment Side Tables

About the Item

French Forties pair of side tables/nightstands by Jacques Adnet in parchment with bronze mounts and Lucite pulls. Documented. Measures: 21" wide x 13" deep x 22" high. Jacques Adnet (1900-1984) An icon of luxurious French Modernism, was both an architect and a designer. Adnet was born in 1900 and grew up with the 20th century - as the beauty of the world was being captured through photography and film, undreamed of speeds were attained by rail and airplane, and machinery became precisioned. And artists in all disciplines searched for ways to ennoble that which they touched and turned into works of art. Adnet attended the Municipal School of Design in Auxerre and the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs to study architecture under Charles Genuys. In Paris, he worked for the prestigious designers Henri Rapin and Maurice Dufrene. He exhibited at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Adnet was distinctly avant garde and was among the first of the French modernist designers to expect metal and glass to integrate with the structure and decoration of furniture. in 1926 he designed the salle commune of the Ile-de-France. By 1928, had become Director of La Compagnie des Arts Français - at the age of 28! The chic address of CAF at 116 rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré in Paris, where he stayed until 1959, provided Adnet with an ideal platform from which to promote his modernist designs. These incorporated precious woods, chromed metals, embellishments such as mirror, leather, parchment and smoked glass in linear styles with decoration pared away wherever possible. A 1930 quote summarized the effort: “What a lot of work to achieve simplicity!” In 1970 Adnet became director of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. He died in 1984 having created a legacy of Fine design that feels “modern” even today.

Creator:
Jacques Adnet (Designer)
Dimensions:
Height: 22 in (55.88 cm)Width: 21 in (53.34 cm)Depth: 13 in (33.02 cm)
Sold As:
Set of 2
Style:
Art Deco (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Bronze,Lucite,Parchment Paper
Place of Origin:
France
Period:
1940-1949
Date of Manufacture:
circa 1840
Condition:
Refinished.
Seller Location:
Philadelphia, PA
Reference Number:
Seller: #12271stDibs: LU843725391802
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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, urbane club chairs. His most noted pieces — 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.