EXHIBITION: Pierre Chareau's Chic Modern Architecture and Design at NYC's elegant Jewish Museum

For the next two months, New York City's elegant Jewish Museum will highlight 
the design work and architecture of noted French artist and arts patron Pierre Chareau. 
Though not quite a household name like his friends Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani, Jacques Lipchitz, and Max Ernst, Chareau was an internationally recognized artist

who specialized in high-style designs for the film industry during the period 
between World Wars I and II.

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Below: Chareau set designs, c. 1938

Chareau was a man of numerous talents and interests. He collaborated with modernist architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, creating furniture for three French films by director Marcel L’Herbier; opened two shops in Paris in the mid-1920s, one that sold cushions and hand-throws, and the other that sold furniture and lighting; designed stage sets for Edmond Fleg’s production of Merchant of Paris at the Comédie Française in 1929; and hosted salons, together with his wife, Dollie, for the celebrated artists, writers, 

and musicians of his time.

 Above and below:

Chareau is noted for building the first house in France made of 
steel and glass, the famed Maison de Verre (1928-1932).

“No house in France better reflects the magical promise of 20th-century architecture than the Maison de Verre,” then architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in an August 2007 New York Times article, after having spent a few days at this famed Left Bank abode.

Rendering of the garden of the Maison de Verre, Paris
Courtesy Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The Jewish Museum exhibition also addresses Chareau’s life and work in the New York area, created after he left Paris during the German occupation of the city. This includes 
the house he designed for painter Robert Motherwell in 1947 in 
East Hampton, Long Island.

Above:
section of the Robert Motherwell house

Bad reviews for this project led to a decline in commissions for the designer, so he 
earned money by giving cooking lessons to wealthy Americans and by 
selling art from his personal collection. Critics!

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Below:

 Views from the exhibition Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design, 
running through March 26, 2017 at The Jewish Museum, NY. 
Photos: Will Ragozzino/SocialShutterbug.com

 

 For more information about this exhibition, link
here. 

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 And don't forget to check out the new Russ and Daughters deli
at the museum, a long-awaited and instantly popular addition 
to the uptown Manhattan eating scene.

The Anne: wild Western nova smoked salmon, smoked yellowfin tuna, 

sable, smoked brook trout, and wild Alaskan salmon roe. Photo: Paul Wagtouicz


~oOo~