Andrée Putman has a habit of losing things. But, more importantly, of finding them. The silver necklace she wears—and has done every day for the past twenty years—she found in a gutter. Her silver scalloped cigarette case, into which she empties the Gauloises that account for her rich-roasted voice, has been recovered three times after assorted robberies. This lucky trait she owes to her mother, who once found a long-lost purse deep in a forest, drawn to the spot by Andrée’s sister who had urged her to come and see a remarkable frog . . . which just happened to be sitting on the purse.
Certain objects, then, exert some kind of magical influence on Putman, luring her to them through time. France’s leading interior designer has made it her mission to find and restore to recognition seminal works of design history, hitherto condemned to obscurity by their creators’ heirs (or “hares” as she says).
Putman has just exhibited a collection of the furniture which she has rediscovered and “edited” for reproduction, at Liberty, under the enigmatic title Positive Negative. The allusion to monochrome is apt: Putman’s interior design palette is, like Henry Ford’s for the Model T, anything you like so long as it’s black . . . and white, and occasionally grey and silver. She dresses in this colour combination (mainly in Azzedine Alaïa and Thierry Mugler), and the objets d’art of modern design which she has reincarnated are likewise variations on this minimalist theme.
Putman’s company, Ecart International, is now in one hundred countries, although she steadfastly refuses to sell in South Africa, where the issue of black and white is no joking matter. To be “à l’écart,” she explains, means “on the side,” not belonging to the world.
The designers included in her collection were all solitary people, so much so that when she first became interested in “the detective life” of tracking down the rights to their work, most people couldn’t spell names like Robert Mallet-Stevens, or René Herbst, and put an “e” in Gray (Eileen, of the lovely leather armchair and mirror and rugs). Mariano Fortuny—coincidentally the subject of a show at Liberty featuring the crumply silk gowns for which he is best known—“was a couturier, full stop,” until Putman showed the world his great black umbrella of a studio light, designed to illuminate his own photography sessions.
“I look at myself as a very naive archaeologist of the future,” she says. “I have been very interested all of my life by the loss and mystery of some major pieces.” She never actually met Ms. Gray: a rendezvous was arranged by a mutual friend but “while walking along rue Bonaparte, she had a run in her stocking and said she couldn’t come.” Having just started work with Zeev Aram on reissuing her furniture, Ms. Gray later died of a chill.
Putman was not always destined for a life in design. She trained to become a composer for six years at the Conservatoire de Paris, but at an important exam the chief juror took her aside and advised her that if she was prepared to sit in a room with paper and erasers for ten years she might turn into an “interesting” composer, perhaps along the lines of Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Béla Bartók, her favourites. “I said, ‘Thank you so much. I want to talk, to hear people; I want real life.’ I’m not someone who can, of my own choosing, become the prisoner of something I’m not certain to be the best at.”
Right now, she seems to have achieved the desired status. Her clientele includes famous and infamous names from fashion and what one might, in Eileen Gray’s day, have described as “high society.” She has done all of Karl Lagerfeld’s houses (in Paris, Rome, and Monte Carlo), as well as his Paris offices; Valentino showrooms in Italy; ten Yves Saint Laurent boutiques around the world; and sundry shops for Mugler and Alaïa. She has just redesigned the women’s departments in Barneys, the upmarket Manhattan store; elsewhere in New York she has assisted Arata Isozaki on Steve Rubell’s Palladium nightclub, refurbished Morgans Hotel for the same client, and is all set to transform his latest hotel, the Royalton. Putman also selected the furniture for the Park Avenue apartment of Stephen (Knoll International) Swid and his wife, Nan (Swid Powell), recently renovated for the second time in seven years by Gwathmey Siegel. There are, of course, innumerable other private clients who simply can’t be named.
Her philosophy is clear. Black and white, as a strong but neutral background, allows objects “of any period to create, by their differences, a kind of vibration.” Particularly so when the objects are works of art, but it is “very distressed in a place where many colours are used: it creates conflicts, loss of concentration. I see places more like envelopes for people to live in. Not as décors [tone of basso profundo disdain]. Design is the envelope. Décor is something which is stuck forever. Everything should be moved. Flexibility for me is a sign of civilisation.”
Putman believes that environment has succeeded fashion as “the obsession of the world.” But, just as she despises those who are slaves to fashion, she believes people should “find the style which is them and stick to it in their environment. It helps to ignore all these laws and rules.”
She will soon launch a collection of her own furniture designs: a console, a chair, a desk, a couple of tables, all in laminated Formica. Just for a bit of adventure, there will be some beige and a pinstripe of electric blue in them. She has also designed fabrics, china, mosaiclike tiles, stationery, and rugs, manufactured by various French and Italian firms. Having completed the interior design of French Minister of Culture Jack Lang’s office (“It’s a room full of tricks”), and the library, film theatre, and conference room in the new Bordeaux Museum of Modern Art, she is working on the interior of the hôtel de région (local government headquarters) for Bordeaux, in a new building designed by a local firm of architects.
The young designers in her team (the Putman design firm is also called Ecart “as I believed neither of them was going to succeed”) are plucked straight from school whenever possible. She feels it’s better if they are not sullied by experience in other offices. Putman has an eye for young talent—Philippe Starck and the upcoming Patrick Naggar, for example.
Perhaps her instinct for nurturing such designers—and for vindicating the forgotten greats—is a defensive response. She still remembers being ostracised by her friends “in the very serious world of art” for her eclectic interests in fashion and design. “They were so hostile to the arts and crafts, because these were things people could use for their lives. You know, in [Samuel] Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, Estragon calls the other person ‘Architect!’ It’s like salaud.”