Andrée Putman
“I loathe pompous luxury. I take interest in the essential, the framework, the basic elements of things.“
“It is not about bathing in the living room and cooking in the bedroom but rather about opening spaces to various activities. Why should places be reduced to one function instead of favouring the sensations they bring us?”
Unclassifiable, atypical, deeply free, Andrée Putman has, throughout her career, imagined bridges between the different arts, fashion, decoration and design. Andrée Putman readily defines herself as “the daughter of a couple of black sheep, themselves descended from a long line of black sheep”.
Born in 1925, of an intellectual father, normalien mastering seven languages to perfection, but having made a vow of austerity and seclusion in reaction to his environment, and a concert mother, talented pianist, whimsical, who consoled herself in the frivolity of “being an immense artist without a stage”. Andrée retains the best of it, a precocious artistic taste but also the rejection of bourgeois conventions.
Andrée Putman became a journalist for several magazines then joined in 1958, as a stylist, the chain of popular stores Prisunic, where she worked “to do beautiful things for nothing”: she imagined pieces of furniture and decoration at affordable. She then distinguished herself within the Mafia style agency .
In 1971, she created with her friend Didier Grumbach an innovative company specializing in the development of ready-to-wear: Créateurs et Industriels . In the concept store on rue de Rennes in Paris, her intuition revealed many talents, such as Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Issey Miyake, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler.
“My only concern was to say to myself: ‘if I interest at least ten people, I will have accomplished something that will carry me all my life'”.
In 1978, Andrée Putman created the Ecart company and resuscitated the forgotten talents of the 1930s: Eileen Gray, René Herbst, Jean-Michel Frank, Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet-Stevens, … She was passionate about their work, unearthed pieces, restores, reissues them, makes them known. She is developing a catalog of inestimable coherence.
In 1984, the development of the Morgans Hotel in New York, the first boutique hotel in the world, marked a turning point in her career: she managed to create a luxury hotel with very few means. Andrée is thus called upon to develop more and more interior design projects and designs hotel interiors for Sheraton or Ritz Carlton, boutiques for Azzedine Alaïa and Karl Lagerfeld. She also imagined offices, notably that of Jack Lang at the Ministry of Culture in 1984, and museums such as the CAPC, contemporary art museum in Bordeaux and the Fine Arts museum in Rouen.
Through her creations, Andrée Putman wishes to reconcile rich and poor materials and use light in an unprecedented way. She strives to lay bare spaces to find their origin. Throughout her work, she also tackles lifestyles by reforming our uses of spaces.
“the most successful interiors are those where you don’t notice the originality, but where you just have the feeling of feeling good there. »
In 1997, Andrée Putman created Studio Putman, specializing in interior architecture, design and scenography.
She furnishes hotels, private residences, offices, shops all over the world and imagines objects and furniture.
In 2007, Andrée Putman wanted to open a new and big chapter by entrusting her daughter, Olivia, with the reins of her studio and thus perpetuate a know-how, a label, a style, a stamp.
Indifferent to trends, Andrée Putman constantly reminds us that design should serve to soften and embellish life.
“I love the beautiful and the useful, and even more the beautiful in the useful. “
