An Art of Living

An Art of Living

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First lines of the preface by Eugène Claudius-Petit

Of Simple Words

Charlotte Perriand? It was a full life, productive, where every day brought its offering to creation. Charlotte unknown? Certainly, but did she ever make an effort for it to be otherwise? She never ran after either baubles or medals. It is another dream that inhabited the way she saw things and beings, the space they occupy and change by their movement.

First lines of the preface by François Mathey

She is called Charlotte

She is called Charlotte. Charlotte, this is the image of the beautiful creation, of the work that has been given thought, she is also a heck of a good woman who wrestles with works and days, takes them head on and resolves them calmly because she applies her realistic instinct to them, her feeling for order, her love of things. As much as a man, and probably much better. We imagine her on a construction site, and the companion seduced by so much profession: “she is in her element, Charlotte”

Extracts from the postface by Yvonne Brunhammer

Charlotte Perriand’s Art of Living

“In front of a beautiful blank page, I would like to be twenty years old...” Charlotte Perriand closed the dialogue with herself in this way, which, through the pages of this book, and in the exhibition of her work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, reinstates her story for us. She has just devoted a year of her life to it and it is already too much time taken away from the present and its mutations and from the future. […]

Who among us, leaving the exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs will again accept the clutter of their interior? “Would we think of listening at the same time to several pieces of music?” Okakura Kakuzo questions in the Book of Tea.