cover image Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design

Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design

Edited by Esther Da Costa Meyer. Jewish Museum, $60 (288p) ISBN 978-0-300-16579-1

The great, unsung talents of French modernist Pierre Chareau (1883–1950) as an interior designer are on ample display here, representing, as editor da Costa Meyer notes in her introduction, his superlative “ability to hold seemingly incompatible materials in tension.” Sumptuous textile patterns and opulent woods counterbalance stark white walls and angular metal elements. In his work for a wide variety of residential, commercial, and cinematic clients, no feature of a room was too trivial for stylistic improvement: corner sconces and ashtray stands are reinvented as surely as any of the large features that are typically the designer’s concern. Chareau’s work with ceilings—a feature essentially ignored by many designers and most architects—would be worth a book of its own, and this overview is particularly adept when drawing focus to Chareau’s ceiling design. Strange angles, alcoves, domes, and sculptural stalactites make it acutely clear that people will notice ceilings if there’s something there worth seeing. Several essays further accentuate Chareau’s work and life, making the book an incisive visual study into a career that deserves all this attention and more. Color photos. (Dec.)