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Jean E. Puiforcat: New Discoveries
GAIL S. DAVIDSON
Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York
The French silversmith, Jean E. Puiforcat (1897-1945), ranks among the greatest twentieth-century designers of silver tabletop objects. This paper discusses a recent gift to Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution of more than one hundred Jean E. Puiforcat drawings, as weIl as archival documents and photographs, and how this material adds to our knowledge of this great master of modern silver. Puiforcat began his professional career following World War I, at a critical time for French decorative arts industries. Stung by the successful 1910 showing in Paris of modern German design, critics challenged French designers to create new forms expressive of contemporary life that would restore to France the leadership position it had always held in decorative arts and design. Jean E. Puiforcat was one of several French silversmiths who experimented with the ”new” hollowware designs and flatware. Working in a reductivist process between 1921 and 1923, he pared-down any applied historicist or art nouveau vegetal ornament on his silver models and adopted simple, classical fluting that emphasized the swelling volumes and curving contours of his vessels. Before the 1925 Paris Exposition International des Ans Décoratifs et Modernes, Puiforcat invented dramatic cubist-inspired centerpieces and tea services with stepped bases and angular bodies augmented with wood or semiprecious stones. When these objects were exhibited at the 1925 Paris Exposition, Puiforcat was hailed as the major French silver designer of his time. But his greatest achievements were to come.
While drawn to geometric forms in mid-1920s, it was only in the late 1920s that Puiforcat became more knowledgeable about using mathematics to achieve perfect, precisely calculated, spare, geometric volumes. Mathematics and science had been common interests among French avant-garde painters, architects, and designers since the late teens. Puiforcat must have become interested in mathematics through conversations with his designer friends and colleagues including Pierre Chareau, René Herbst. He also would have read or heard about Le Corbusier’s interest in the golden section and its application to architecture. He could weIl have known Matila Ghyka’s discussion of design and the golden section in his 1927 book Esthétique des Proportions dans La Nature et dans Les Arts (Paris, Gallimard). The golden section (described as the division of a line so that the smaller section is to the larger section as the larger section is to the length of the whole line) is also known as ”divine proportion” since this ratio, according to the Greeks, was found in every living object, induding the movements of the planets.
The impact on Puiforcat of the current vogue for matbematics appears in his silver pieces of 1927–1929 when he created his sparest and purest objects, such as a 1929 Silver Vase (collection Torsten Bröhan) in the form of a cylinder intersected by a three-dimensional parallelogram. By late 1929 and certainly by 1930, just at the moment when he became a founding member of the avant-garde design group Union des Artistes Modernes, Puiforcat began to incorporate the golden section and other mathematical ratios in the design process.
His more sophisticated application of mathematical proportions is documented in the drawings now owned by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. A Design for a Silver Box, 1934 (1995-164-43), for example, shows the mathematical tracing lines, that Puiforcat called ”traces harmoniques”, underlying the composition of the box. Furthermore, in the drawing’s lower right corner, the draftsman included the Greek letter phi symbolizing the golden section. The creator of this drawing would have been one of the employees at Puiforcat Orfèvre, who the designer presumably trained in making the necessary mathematical calculations to prepare such a drawing. The silversmith was living and working most of the time in St. Jean-de-Luz where in 1929 he had built a house for his family. He probably sent bis rough design sketches to Paris where assistants prepared drawings to ”correct” the proportions of the designs so they conformed to the required mathematical ratios.
Mathematics and the golden section appealed to Puiforcat’s own aesthetic and strong religious beliefs. In addition, he discovered that he could market himself and the uniqueness of his silver creations by stressing the mathematical purity of his designs as compared with those of contemporary French silver firms.
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© 2008 Bröhan-Museum | Bronze-Figur: Agathon Léonard, Danseuse au
bracelet (Tänzerin mit Armband), um 1900, Bronze, goldpatiniert,
Susse Frères, Paris | Abb.: Kaffee- und Teeservice, Maison Cardeilhac,
Paris, um 1890 | Webdesign unicom-berlin.de |
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