Lead time: Approximately 8 weeks. Please note these chairs are made by hand, and therefore my show minor imperfections in the coating process. The 222 Chairs are final sale. Product ID 13986552854790638192

Robert Mallet-Stevens played an important role in French modernism at the beginning of the 20th century. While he practiced architecture within the mode of the International Style through his collaborations with artists, sculptors, film directors, painters, and furniture designers, he also developed a unique formal language. Mallet-Stevens was the son of a prominent art expert associated with the Paris Impressionists. In 1905, he joined the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris where his interest quickly turned to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose organization of interior spaces he admired. The same year, his uncle Adolf Stoclet called on the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann, a family friend, to build his main residence (the Palais Stoclet, Brussels). Hoffmann, along with Otto Wagner and the Vienna Secessionist movement, influenced Mallet-Stevens greatly. Encouraged by Francis Jourdain, his projects for furniture and interiors were exhibited in the Salon d’Automne, granting him access that allowed him to meet with the decorator Pierre Chareau and with the sculptors, the Martel brothers, with whom he collaborated throughout his entire life. In 1922, while Le Corbusier designed his master plan for a Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants, Mallet-Stevens was publishing an album of drawings, "Une cité moderne," that reflected the eclecticism of the Viennese Secession. (What united the Secession members was their rejection of historical realism in painting and revivalism in architecture, in favor of Jugendstil, and the proto-functionalism of Deco and Bauhaus aesthetics). "Une cité moderne" consisted of a collection of buildings, individual fragments of an urban repertoire—a police station, a town hall, a bus stop, or bridges—each type possessing an autonomous form. The project demonstrated a tendency toward eclecticism, which he would later reject. Mallet-Stevens’s most important commission came in 1923 when the Viscount de Noailles and his wife, a young French aristocrat, decided to build a splendid villa in Hyères, France. After meeting with Le Corbusier, who declined the invitation, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was not suitable for political reasons, the viscount discovered Mallet-Stevens, a Paris acquaintance who had not yet built any significant commissions. With the Villa Noailles, however, Mallet-Stevens achieved a reductive yet elegant expression of simple cubic volumes. He preferred clean facades to constructive details or ornament; smooth gray and white surfaces and large horizontal openings composed the house. The villa was later showcased in a Surrealist film made in 1928 by Man Ray titled "Le mystère du château de Dé" (The Mysteries of the Château of Dice), in which the artist melded the stark forms of the villa with Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dé jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A throw of dice will never abolish chance”). Mallet-Stevens designed numerous sets for the cinema, including Marcel L’Herbier’s "L'Inhumaine" (The Inhuman One, 1923), a collaborative project that also included cubo-futurist painter Fernand Léger and designer René Lalique. The film was acclaimed by the Club des Amis du Septième Art (Friends of the Cinematographic Arts), the first avant-garde ciné-club of its kind to which Mallet-Stevens belonged. His colleagues led him to design his largest project in 1926-27, the Rue Mallet-Stevens houses in Auteuil, a street of urban mansions for the architect, artists, and his patrons. The ensemble was a series of houses ending at the border of the street, expressed through a consistent yet varied Cubist vocabulary. After 1926, influenced in part by De Stijl aesthetics and his own shift towards reductivism, Mallet-Stevens abandoned ornamentation and continued to develop modernist pavilions for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs (International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Paris, 1925, 1937), private villas (such as the Corbusian-inspired Villa Cavroix, in Croix, France, 1932), and commercial buildings, such as the Garage Alfa-Romeo in Paris (1925). The latter reflected his passion for machines and speed shared with the Italian Futurists. At the beginning of World War II, Mallet-Stevens fled to southern France with his Jewish wife and worked on large-scale competitions in which he insisted on the value of volumetric masses. His key role in the French avant-garde was neglected until 1980, when his work was brought to light with the reconstruction of the Villa Noailles and the rediscovery of Dadaist cinema. Criticized by his peers for being too much of a formalist, the architect was nevertheless a designer of great importance in the development of modern art and architecture in France in the first part of the 20th century.

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