Pierre Paulin is on everyone's lips! After Vuitton and Galerie Perrotin, it is the Center Pompidou which will dedicate its rooms to him next May. An omnipresence that illustrates the longevity of an inimitable style whose original pieces are still lingered on and always to Paul Bert Serpette.
Born in 1927, Pierre Paulin wanted to define himself as an "autodidact". Without the baccalauréat, unable to apply to the Arts Déco, he joined the benches of the Camondo school in 1951, influenced by a great uncle sculptor, Freddy Stoll, and an uncle car designer, Georges Paulin. Pupil of Marcel Gascoin, pioneer of French design, he embarked on a journey with his brother in the Nordic countries in search of a design conceived for the user. It was with a Dutch company, Artifort, that he made his most iconic pieces between 1960 and 1970. Like the Mushroom armchair or Paulin's favorite F560, which revolutionizes the principle of mounting a seat thanks to an elastic jersey that completely encloses the seat and backrest. This prolific worker who left behind a pharaonic quantity of drawings in his cartons was an intransigent to solid social commitment. Modeste, Pierre Paulin is in the conception and not in the creation: the chair, the armchair, the table, everything is already there. If he reinvents them, he does not create them since they exist. "A designer responds to an order and a specification; It is a dog on a leash. The artist is a wolf, wild and free. "From the ground up in reality, in the everyday, it produces cheap and draws plastic garden chairs and bathroom furniture for Allibert, irons and razors for Calor, ...
Paulin addresses the people. But he did not let the indifferent elites ... [He] revolutionized the interior of the baby boomers with its seats in foam covered with stretch textile, as well as the apartments of the Élysée, notes his biographer Nadine Descendre. His collaborations for the public authorities are indeed numerous: from the House of Radio in 1961 to the Palais de Jena in 1987, passing by private apartments at the Élysée de Pompidou in 1971, the Paris City Hall in 1985 or the office Commissioned by Mitterrand in 1984 to replace the Louis XV decoration of De Gaulle. Forty years of collaboration with the National Furniture, greeted by the Gobelins one year before his death. From the average French to the man of power, the Pauline style seduces everyone. A light style, which is not afraid of the void. "My tables?" He declared to Le Figaro in 1965, "I see them increasingly lighter, in a sense, small flying furniture playing a simple role of backup. Their silhouette? A central base on a circular base, a tray widening in mushroom (...). "On his desk, he has the aerial idea to suspend the caissons thus guaranteeing the lightness of the whole. Paulin's simplicity is first and foremost a principle. An intrinsic simplicity that leads him to use the vocabulary of publishers and manufacturers to encode his furniture of letters and figures. Today, reissued by Artifort or the publishing house directed by his son, Paulin Paulin Paulin, period pieces are increasingly rare ... These last vestiges of a taste for a happy sobriety that guided his life can still to be at Paul Bert Serpette.