Andrée Putman
Encyclopedia
Andrée Putman is a French interior and product designer.
Long considered as a shocking eccentric by the French as she likes to defend the indefensible, Andrée Putman partly owes her reputation to foreigners. New Yorkers were the first ones to see her as an artist, a Parisian icon of French taste.
Adventurous, atypical, deeply free, Andrée Putman has established new connections between arts, fashion, interior design and product design during her whole career. Independent from intellectual circles, she likes to take a little something from each discipline in order to create her own language of shapes, materials, colours and symbols. It is this particular vocabulary that she later uses in her work, the furniture she designs, the areas she imagines, the objects she creates.
who speaks seven languages but swore a life of austerity and seclusion to protest against his own milieu; her mother is a concert performer, a whimsical piano player who finds comfort in the frivolity of “being a great artist without a stage”.
Andrée grew up in the 6th district of Paris, rue des Grands-Augustins. As a child, she spent most of her summers at the Fontenay Abbey, a magnificent Cistercian structure which used to be the Montgolfier brothers
’ workshop. This austere place influences her first aesthetical perceptions: the geometry of the architecture, the views and the perspectives, “the effects of stone and light, the richness and the diversity of non-colours...” These elements find an echo in her future achievements: “All this made me very wary of awful excesses of anything”.
However, Andrée’s artistic education first came through music: her mother, Louise Saint-René Taillandier, takes her and her sister to concerts very early and urges them to learn the piano. She is nevertheless told that her hands are not the ones of piano player and that, as a consequence, she will never be a virtuoso. She therefore studies composition at the National Conservatory of Paris. At the age of nineteen, she receives the First Harmony Prize of the Conservatory from Francis Poulenc
himself; on this occasion, he tells her that at least ten more years of unremitting work and ascetic life will be necessary to – maybe – aspire to a career as a composer. She then pictures herself living like the Carmelite nuns at the Fontenay Abbey and this sentence cuts short her musical career, a future planned as a tribute to her mother.
Andrée therefore decides to satisfy her curiosity another way.
First of all, she has a serious bike accident from which she barely survives at the age of twenty. Her characteristic posture stems from this event: she is a tall woman who stands straight and walks as if on a tightrope. Soon after the accident, she breaks free from her career in music and from the illusion of safety her social environment offers her; instead, she decides to go and discover the world. One day, she empties her bedroom and furnishes it with just a hard iron bed, a chair and a Miró poster on the white walls. This early expression of her desire of independence leads to a confrontation with her family who wonders “if she realises the sorrow she makes them feel?”
“What can one do when one did not go to school and is a musician who stopped playing music?” she asks her grandmother, Madeleine Saint-René Taillandier, “ice queen and socialite” president of the literary prize Fémina. “Nothing except messenger.”
Taking her grandmother’s advice, Andrée starts working as a messenger for Femina magazine. While taking care of all the dirty little jobs of the office, she observes with a sharp eye the social theatre which takes place during meetings. She also works for Elle and L’Oeil, a prestigious art magazine where the still-lives she imagines with objects of various styles and from different periods attract attention. She identifies what is sophisticated and innovative, widens her knowledge of designers... and walks by the Café de Flore
everyday.
“We could see Antonin Artaud
, Juliette Greco
, Giacometti, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
… People who looked free and were emancipated from conventions.” These first jobs allow Andrée to meet artists, characters more familiar to her than intellectuals. At the time, she is not confident enough to fully express herself. She therefore stays in the background to rather put the talents of others in the limelight, something for which she shows great talent since she was raised in an artistically-rich environment. Personally knowing what it is to “be trapped into the beaten tracks”, she is moved by “people whose work is not understood”, “impressed by these artists who do not look for anything else but remaining in the depth of their sincerity, their risk”, she only wishes to help them and establish a connection between them and the rest of the world.
In the late 1950s, Andrée Aynard marries Jacques Putman, art critic, collector and publisher. Together they associate with artists such as Pierre Alechinsky
, Bram van Velde
, Alberto Giacometti
or Niki de Saint Phalle
. They have two children: Cyrille and Olivia.
In 1958, Andrée Putman collaborates with the chain of stores Prisunic as Art Director of the Home Department, where her motto is to “design beautiful things for nothing”. Her wish of making art available to a larger public also becomes a reality through Prisunic as she organises with her husband the edition of lithographs by famous artists sold for only 100 Francs (15 €).
In 1968, she distinguishes herself in the style agency Mafia until Didier Grumbach spots her in 1971 and hires her to start a new company which aims at developing the textile industry: Créateurs & Industriels. Her intuition will lead her to reveal many talented designers such as Jean-Charles de Castelbajac
, Issey Miyake
, Ossie Clark
, Claude Montana
and Thierry Mugler
. It is at that moment that she goes into interior design as she converts former SNCF
premises into a showroom and offices for the company.
She starts by giving life again to forgotten designers from the 1930s: Herbst
, Jean-Michel Frank
, Charraud, Mallet-Stevens, Gaudi, Eileen Gray
... She digs out pieces, restores and release them again to put together a very consistent catalogue. “My only concern was to interest at least ten persons and I would have accomplished something which would carry me for all my life”. These pieces of furniture won over not ten, but thousands of people.
From releasing furniture to designing interiors, the evolution of activity came quite naturally. Driven by her love for pure structures, Andrée Putman takes this next logical step. “I loathe pompous luxury. I take interest in the essential, the framework, the basic elements of things.”
The interior design of the Morgans Hotel in New York in 1984 marks a turning point in Andrée Putman’s career: she manages to make a high-standard hotel with a small budget and asserts her style with sober rooms and visual effects. “Because I started working in New York, the French suddenly asked for me.” From the 1980s, she leads more and more interior design projects: hotels such as Le Lac in Japan, Im Wasserturm in Germany and the Sheraton in Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris; stores for Azzedine Alaia
, Balenciaga
, Bally
and Lagerfeld
; offices, particularly the one for French Minister of Culture Jack Lang
in 1984; and museums like the CAPC, Bordeaux’s contemporary art museum.
In her work, not only did Andrée Putman reconcile “rich” and “poor” materials, found a new way to use light and cleared spaces to rediscover their origin; she also tackled the ways of living. The private residences she designed enabled her to break the rules: why dine in the dining room, cook in the kitchen and sleep in the bedroom when one can overcome obstacles and change one’s ways? “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?” Andrée Putman was one of the firsts in France to live in a loft.
Her free spirit also shows in her liking for practical jokes. For example, when a documentary was being made about her and she was showing her loft in Saint-Germain-des-Prés
, she explained her taste for monochromatic environments by referring to... Bécassine
.
When she imagines objects, she refuses the excess of striving to re-design pieces which were perfectly designed by others in the past. “We have to accept that many things can no longer be changed -- or very slightly. If we change them, we have to add humour, detachment. What interests me: a joke in a collection, a sign of complicity.” For example, when she starts collaborating with Christofle
in 2000, she designs a collection of silver cutlery, objects and jewellery named Vertigo. The common element of this collection is a slightly twisted ring: “the fact that this ring is twisted brings life to it: did it fall? Why is it asymmetrical? Life is made of imperfections.”She created a Champagne bucket for Veuve Clicquot
and reinterpreted the iconic Louis Vuitton
Steamer Bag. In 2001, Andrée creates a perfume “Préparation Parfumée”; two years later, she launches her own line of furniture “Préparation meublée” which pieces are ironically named « Croqueuse de diamants », « Jeune bûcheron », « Bataille d’oreillers »… (“Gold digger”, “Young lumberjack” and “Pillow fight”)
As interior designer, she carried out the Pershing Hall
in Paris, The Pagoda house in Tel Aviv, art collector and gallery owner Pearl Lam’s apartment in Shanghai and the Blue Spa at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich. In 2005, Guerlain
chooses the Studio Putman to re-design its flagship store on the Champs Elysées. For Bernard-Henri Lévy
and Arielle Dombasle
’s cliff-house in Tangier, Andrée restructures the building and designs rooms both sober and majestic.
In 2007, a new era begins as Andrée’s daughter Olivia Putman
accepts to take over the Art Direction of the Studio, a wish its founder had expressed for a long time. “We realised that time and Andrée’s fame had turned our family name into an adjective: a project was Putman or was not Putman!” says Olivia Putman. Qualified in History of Art and landscape architecture, Olivia wishes to perpetuate the eclecticism and curiosity her mother always claimed.
In 2008, Paris Mayor Bertand Delanoë makes Andrée President of the first Paris Design Comity, which aims at rethinking street furniture, Parisian public equipments and employees’ uniforms. That same year, she presents Voie Lactée (“Milky Way”), the grand piano she designed for France’s oldest piano manufacturer Pleyel and unveils Entrevue, her creation for Bisazza at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. In June, the store she designed for fashion designer Anne Fontaine in New York is inaugurated, following the ones designed in Paris and Tokyo.
The following year, Andrée and Olivia present the chair they designed for the American firm Emeco, a line of sunglasses for RAC Paris, a collection of carpets for Toulemonde Bochart, a knife for Laguiole
, as well as furniture for Fermob and Silvera. The Studio was also called upon to imagine the scenography for French singer Christophe’s concerts at the Olympia and at Versailles, and the Madeleine Vionnet
exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In October 2009, a new monography dedicated to Andrée Putman’s career is published by Rizzoli Editions ; in 2010, Paris City Hall pays tribute to Andrée Putman by hosting a great exhibition about her life, for which Olivia is curator. The event Andrée Putman, ambassador of style attracted more than 250.000 visitors.
Long considered as a shocking eccentric by the French as she likes to defend the indefensible, Andrée Putman partly owes her reputation to foreigners. New Yorkers were the first ones to see her as an artist, a Parisian icon of French taste.
Adventurous, atypical, deeply free, Andrée Putman has established new connections between arts, fashion, interior design and product design during her whole career. Independent from intellectual circles, she likes to take a little something from each discipline in order to create her own language of shapes, materials, colours and symbols. It is this particular vocabulary that she later uses in her work, the furniture she designs, the areas she imagines, the objects she creates.
Childhood and youth (1925-1944)
Andrée Putman was born in a wealthy family of bankers and notables from Lyon. Her grand-father, Edouard Aynard founded the Maynard & Sons Bank ; her grand-mother, Edouard’s wife, is Rose de Montgolfier, a descendant of the hot-air balloon inventors’ family. Her father is a graduate from the prestigious Ecole Normale SupérieureÉcole Normale Supérieure
The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...
who speaks seven languages but swore a life of austerity and seclusion to protest against his own milieu; her mother is a concert performer, a whimsical piano player who finds comfort in the frivolity of “being a great artist without a stage”.
Andrée grew up in the 6th district of Paris, rue des Grands-Augustins. As a child, she spent most of her summers at the Fontenay Abbey, a magnificent Cistercian structure which used to be the Montgolfier brothers
Montgolfier brothers
Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier were the inventors of the montgolfière-style hot air balloon, globe aérostatique. The brothers succeeded in launching the first manned ascent, carrying Étienne into the sky...
’ workshop. This austere place influences her first aesthetical perceptions: the geometry of the architecture, the views and the perspectives, “the effects of stone and light, the richness and the diversity of non-colours...” These elements find an echo in her future achievements: “All this made me very wary of awful excesses of anything”.
However, Andrée’s artistic education first came through music: her mother, Louise Saint-René Taillandier, takes her and her sister to concerts very early and urges them to learn the piano. She is nevertheless told that her hands are not the ones of piano player and that, as a consequence, she will never be a virtuoso. She therefore studies composition at the National Conservatory of Paris. At the age of nineteen, she receives the First Harmony Prize of the Conservatory from Francis Poulenc
Francis Poulenc
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...
himself; on this occasion, he tells her that at least ten more years of unremitting work and ascetic life will be necessary to – maybe – aspire to a career as a composer. She then pictures herself living like the Carmelite nuns at the Fontenay Abbey and this sentence cuts short her musical career, a future planned as a tribute to her mother.
Andrée therefore decides to satisfy her curiosity another way.
Professional beginnings (1945-1978)
Andrée Putman’s real life begins with a series of renunciations and each starting over led to great decisions.First of all, she has a serious bike accident from which she barely survives at the age of twenty. Her characteristic posture stems from this event: she is a tall woman who stands straight and walks as if on a tightrope. Soon after the accident, she breaks free from her career in music and from the illusion of safety her social environment offers her; instead, she decides to go and discover the world. One day, she empties her bedroom and furnishes it with just a hard iron bed, a chair and a Miró poster on the white walls. This early expression of her desire of independence leads to a confrontation with her family who wonders “if she realises the sorrow she makes them feel?”
“What can one do when one did not go to school and is a musician who stopped playing music?” she asks her grandmother, Madeleine Saint-René Taillandier, “ice queen and socialite” president of the literary prize Fémina. “Nothing except messenger.”
Taking her grandmother’s advice, Andrée starts working as a messenger for Femina magazine. While taking care of all the dirty little jobs of the office, she observes with a sharp eye the social theatre which takes place during meetings. She also works for Elle and L’Oeil, a prestigious art magazine where the still-lives she imagines with objects of various styles and from different periods attract attention. She identifies what is sophisticated and innovative, widens her knowledge of designers... and walks by the Café de Flore
Café de Flore
The Café de Flore, at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue St. Benoit, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, has long been celebrated for its intellectual clientele....
everyday.
“We could see Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
, Juliette Greco
Juliette Gréco
Juliette Gréco, — also Michelle – is a French actress and popular chanson singer.-Early life and family:Juliette Gréco was born in Montpellier to a Corsican father and a mother who became active in the Résistance, in the Hérault département of southern France. She was raised by her maternal...
, Giacometti, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
… People who looked free and were emancipated from conventions.” These first jobs allow Andrée to meet artists, characters more familiar to her than intellectuals. At the time, she is not confident enough to fully express herself. She therefore stays in the background to rather put the talents of others in the limelight, something for which she shows great talent since she was raised in an artistically-rich environment. Personally knowing what it is to “be trapped into the beaten tracks”, she is moved by “people whose work is not understood”, “impressed by these artists who do not look for anything else but remaining in the depth of their sincerity, their risk”, she only wishes to help them and establish a connection between them and the rest of the world.
In the late 1950s, Andrée Aynard marries Jacques Putman, art critic, collector and publisher. Together they associate with artists such as Pierre Alechinsky
Pierre Alechinsky
Pierre Alechinsky is a Belgian artist. He has lived and worked in France since 1951. His work is related to Tachisme, Abstract expressionism, and Lyrical Abstraction.Alechinsky was born in Brussels...
, Bram van Velde
Bram van Velde
Bram van Velde was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction...
, Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...
or Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle, born Catherine-Marie-Agnès-Brandon Fal de Saint Phalle was a French sculptor, painter, and film maker.-The early years:...
. They have two children: Cyrille and Olivia.
In 1958, Andrée Putman collaborates with the chain of stores Prisunic as Art Director of the Home Department, where her motto is to “design beautiful things for nothing”. Her wish of making art available to a larger public also becomes a reality through Prisunic as she organises with her husband the edition of lithographs by famous artists sold for only 100 Francs (15 €).
In 1968, she distinguishes herself in the style agency Mafia until Didier Grumbach spots her in 1971 and hires her to start a new company which aims at developing the textile industry: Créateurs & Industriels. Her intuition will lead her to reveal many talented designers such as Jean-Charles de Castelbajac
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac
1949: Born on November 28th in Casablanca, son of Louis and Jeanne-Blanche de Castelbajac1968: First collection for Ko and Co, company created at Limoges by his mother Jeanne-Blanche de Castelbajac1969: First show...
, Issey Miyake
Issey Miyake
is a Japanese fashion designer. He is known for his technology-driven clothing designs, exhibitions and fragrances.-Life and career:Miyake was born 22 April 1938 in Hiroshima, Japan. As a seven year-old, he witnessed and survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. He studied...
, Ossie Clark
Ossie Clark
Raymond "Ossie" Clark was an English fashion designer who was a major figure in the Swinging Sixties scene in London and the fashion industry in that era...
, Claude Montana
Claude Montana
Claude Montana is a French fashion designer. His company, The House of Montana, founded in 1979, went bankrupt in 1997.Born in Paris in 1949 to a Catalonian father and German mother, Montana began his career by designing papier-mâché jewelry covered with rhinestones...
and Thierry Mugler
Thierry Mugler
Thierry Mugler is a French fashion designer and creator of several perfumes.-Childhood:Mugler was born in Strasbourg, France on 21 December 1948. His passion led him to focus more on drawing than on school and at the age of 9, he began to study classical dance...
. It is at that moment that she goes into interior design as she converts former SNCF
SNCF
The SNCF , is France's national state-owned railway company. SNCF operates the country's national rail services, including the TGV, France's high-speed rail network...
premises into a showroom and offices for the company.
Ecart (1978-1995)
In the late 1970s, Créateurs & Industriels goes bankrupt and Andrée Putman gets divorced. Facing the shock of separation, she tries to materialise her intense feeling of emptiness: she then lives in a room only furnished with a bed and two lamps “in total austerity, because I no longer knew what I liked”. Taking her friend Michel Guy’s advice, she decides to found Ecart. It is therefore at the age of 53 that Andrée Putman really starts the career which will make her famous from Hong Kong to New York.She starts by giving life again to forgotten designers from the 1930s: Herbst
Herbst
Herbst is the German word for autumn or fall.It may also refer to:Surnames* Christoph Maria Herbst, German actor and comedian* Eduard Herbst , Austrian jurist and statesman* Johann Andreas Herbst , German composer...
, Jean-Michel Frank
Jean-Michel Frank
Jean-Michel Frank was a French interior designer known for minimalist interiors decorated with plain-lined but sumptuous furniture made of luxury materials, such as shagreen, mica, and intricate straw marquetry.-Life and career:...
, Charraud, Mallet-Stevens, Gaudi, Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray
Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray was an Irish furniture designer and architect and a pioneer of the Modern Movement in architecture.- Biography :...
... She digs out pieces, restores and release them again to put together a very consistent catalogue. “My only concern was to interest at least ten persons and I would have accomplished something which would carry me for all my life”. These pieces of furniture won over not ten, but thousands of people.
From releasing furniture to designing interiors, the evolution of activity came quite naturally. Driven by her love for pure structures, Andrée Putman takes this next logical step. “I loathe pompous luxury. I take interest in the essential, the framework, the basic elements of things.”
The interior design of the Morgans Hotel in New York in 1984 marks a turning point in Andrée Putman’s career: she manages to make a high-standard hotel with a small budget and asserts her style with sober rooms and visual effects. “Because I started working in New York, the French suddenly asked for me.” From the 1980s, she leads more and more interior design projects: hotels such as Le Lac in Japan, Im Wasserturm in Germany and the Sheraton in Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris; stores for Azzedine Alaia
Azzedine Alaia
Azzedine Alaïa is a Tunisian-born couturier and shoe designer, particularly successful since the 1980s.-Biography:Alaïa was born in Siliana, Tunisia on 7 June 1940. His parents were wheat farmers but his glamorous twin sister inspired his love for couture. A French friend of his mother fed Alaïa's...
, Balenciaga
Balenciaga
Balenciaga is a fashion house founded by Cristóbal Balenciaga, a Basque designer, born in the Basque Country, Spain. He had a reputation as a couturier of uncompromising standards and was referred to as "the master of us all" by Christian Dior. His bubble skirts and odd, feminine, yet ultra-modern...
, Bally
Bally
Bally Technologies, Inc. is a manufacturer of slot machines and other gaming technology based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is the descendant and continuation of the original Bally Manufacturing Corporation of Chicago....
and Lagerfeld
Lagerfeld
* Karl Otto Lagerfeld, né Lagerfeldt , German fashion designer, artist and photographer* Steven Lagerfeld, the editor of The Wilson Quarterly- Lagerfelt :* Caroline "Carolyn" Eugenie Lagerfelt...
; offices, particularly the one for French Minister of Culture Jack Lang
Jack Lang (French politician)
Jack Mathieu Émile Lang is a French politician. A member of the Socialist Party, he served as France's Minister of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and 1988 to 1992, and as Minister of Education from 1992 to 1993 and 2000 to 2002. He was also the Mayor of Blois from 1989 to 2000...
in 1984; and museums like the CAPC, Bordeaux’s contemporary art museum.
In her work, not only did Andrée Putman reconcile “rich” and “poor” materials, found a new way to use light and cleared spaces to rediscover their origin; she also tackled the ways of living. The private residences she designed enabled her to break the rules: why dine in the dining room, cook in the kitchen and sleep in the bedroom when one can overcome obstacles and change one’s ways? “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?” Andrée Putman was one of the firsts in France to live in a loft.
Her free spirit also shows in her liking for practical jokes. For example, when a documentary was being made about her and she was showing her loft in Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Saint-Germain-des-Prés is an area of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, France, located around the church of the former Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés....
, she explained her taste for monochromatic environments by referring to... Bécassine
Bécassine
Bécassine is a comic strip and the name of its heroine, appearing for the first time in the first issue of La Semaine de Suzette on February 2, 1905...
.
The Studio Andrée Putman(1997-2010)
In 1997, Andrée Putman created her eponymous Studio, specialised in interior design, product design and scenography.When she imagines objects, she refuses the excess of striving to re-design pieces which were perfectly designed by others in the past. “We have to accept that many things can no longer be changed -- or very slightly. If we change them, we have to add humour, detachment. What interests me: a joke in a collection, a sign of complicity.” For example, when she starts collaborating with Christofle
Christofle
Christofle is a manufacturer of fine silver flatware and home accessories based in France since 1830. They are renowned for their sterling, silverplate and stainless flatware. Among Christofle's product lines are silver picture frames, crystal vases and glassware, porcelain dinnerware and silver...
in 2000, she designs a collection of silver cutlery, objects and jewellery named Vertigo. The common element of this collection is a slightly twisted ring: “the fact that this ring is twisted brings life to it: did it fall? Why is it asymmetrical? Life is made of imperfections.”She created a Champagne bucket for Veuve Clicquot
Veuve Clicquot
Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin is both a champagne house in Reims, France, and a brand of premium champagne. Founded in 1772 by Philippe Clicquot-Muiron, Veuve Clicquot played an important role in establishing champagne as a favored drink of haute bourgeoisie and nobility throughout Europe...
and reinterpreted the iconic Louis Vuitton
Louis Vuitton
Louis Vuitton Malletier – commonly referred to as Louis Vuitton , or shortened to LV – is a French fashion house founded in 1854 by Louis Vuitton. The label is well known for its LV monogram, which is featured on most products, ranging from luxury trunks and leather goods to ready-to-wear, shoes,...
Steamer Bag. In 2001, Andrée creates a perfume “Préparation Parfumée”; two years later, she launches her own line of furniture “Préparation meublée” which pieces are ironically named « Croqueuse de diamants », « Jeune bûcheron », « Bataille d’oreillers »… (“Gold digger”, “Young lumberjack” and “Pillow fight”)
As interior designer, she carried out the Pershing Hall
Pershing Hall
The Pershing Hall is a historical building and luxury hotel in Paris, France dedicated to General of the Armies John J. Pershing....
in Paris, The Pagoda house in Tel Aviv, art collector and gallery owner Pearl Lam’s apartment in Shanghai and the Blue Spa at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich. In 2005, Guerlain
Guerlain
Guerlain is a French perfume house, among the oldest in the world. It has a large and loyal customer following, and is held in high esteem in the perfume industry...
chooses the Studio Putman to re-design its flagship store on the Champs Elysées. For Bernard-Henri Lévy
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French public intellectual, philosopher and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" movement in 1976.-Early life:...
and Arielle Dombasle
Arielle Dombasle
Arielle Dombasle is a French-American singer, actress, director and model. Her breakthrough roles were in Éric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach and Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Blue Villa...
’s cliff-house in Tangier, Andrée restructures the building and designs rooms both sober and majestic.
In 2007, a new era begins as Andrée’s daughter Olivia Putman
Olivia Putman
Olivia Putman is a French designer, daughter to Andrée Putman and heir to her mother's design studio, Studio Putman. Her works range from interior architecture to scenography and design.-Biography:...
accepts to take over the Art Direction of the Studio, a wish its founder had expressed for a long time. “We realised that time and Andrée’s fame had turned our family name into an adjective: a project was Putman or was not Putman!” says Olivia Putman. Qualified in History of Art and landscape architecture, Olivia wishes to perpetuate the eclecticism and curiosity her mother always claimed.
In 2008, Paris Mayor Bertand Delanoë makes Andrée President of the first Paris Design Comity, which aims at rethinking street furniture, Parisian public equipments and employees’ uniforms. That same year, she presents Voie Lactée (“Milky Way”), the grand piano she designed for France’s oldest piano manufacturer Pleyel and unveils Entrevue, her creation for Bisazza at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. In June, the store she designed for fashion designer Anne Fontaine in New York is inaugurated, following the ones designed in Paris and Tokyo.
The following year, Andrée and Olivia present the chair they designed for the American firm Emeco, a line of sunglasses for RAC Paris, a collection of carpets for Toulemonde Bochart, a knife for Laguiole
Laguiole
Laguiole is a commune in the Aveyron department in southern France.It is known for its Laguiole cheese, which has an Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée , and as the birthplace of the Laguiole knife. The name of the village comes from la gleisòla, meaning a little church.-Population:-References:*...
, as well as furniture for Fermob and Silvera. The Studio was also called upon to imagine the scenography for French singer Christophe’s concerts at the Olympia and at Versailles, and the Madeleine Vionnet
Madeleine Vionnet
This article is about the haute couture designer. For the fashion label, see Vionnet Madeleine Vionnet was a French fashion designer...
exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In October 2009, a new monography dedicated to Andrée Putman’s career is published by Rizzoli Editions ; in 2010, Paris City Hall pays tribute to Andrée Putman by hosting a great exhibition about her life, for which Olivia is curator. The event Andrée Putman, ambassador of style attracted more than 250.000 visitors.