Sognot, Louis
Louis Sognot (Paris 1892 – 1970)
A former student at the École Bernard Palissy, he learned cabinetmaking at Jansen, then liner outfitting at the Atelier Krieger. After his demobilization in 1919, he joined Les Grands Magasins du Printemps and, after the death of René Guilleré (1878-1931), ran the “Primavera” workshop alongside Charlotte Chauchet-Guilleré until 1939 (when Colette Guéden joined). Primavera – one of the founders of Art Deco – enabled him to publish his first furniture pieces, which he presented at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs.
He was greatly inspired by the Mouvement Moderne, and his creations were soon strongly influenced by Cubism – notably in the famous Primavera pavilion presented at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925. He also discovered the work of Robert Mallet-Stevens and Francis Jourdain, both of whom were to have a major influence on his future designs. Under their patronage, he joined the UAM in 1930.
Although influenced by the chrome-plated metal tube furniture invented by Marcel Breuer, Louis Sognot was to make his own mark on the Mouvement Moderne from the late 1920s onwards. In association with Charlotte Alix, he invented a large number of metal sets that sought to escape from the “Clinical Style” and reconcile themselves with the quality of a certain French tradition asserted at the Salon des artistes décorateurs. He adds materials that – while not rare – exude a preciousness, such as mirrors, wood, rattan, leather or colored fabrics. In 1925, he invented an armchair in chromed steel and leather, a wrap-around chair in croute de cuir and a bar stool with a strong metal tube architecture. These pieces of furniture were widely acclaimed by the critics of the time, as they seemed to reconcile the productivism of industry with the individualism of decor:
“We can see that while they used metal almost everywhere, they only did so in a very rational way, making it part of the whole, blending it with wood without imposing it as the sole material. They didn’t look for standard formulas; on the contrary, they thought that each new piece of furniture implied a new solution, and that’s how they succeeded in giving intimacy to a material that some thought unusable for such purposes”.
Along with Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret and René Herbst, he presented La Maison du Jeune Homme at the 1935 World Fair in Brussels.
The turning point of social modernism
A new turning point in his creative work began at the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques, where Louis Sognot was President of the Etalagistes group at the Palais de la Publicité, just as the first quality creations affordable to the middle classes were spreading – notably in the Swedish Pavilion. He took over at the Salon des arts ménagers in 1939, when he presented a very economical hotel room made entirely of rattan. The war interrupted this democratization, but Louis Sognot resumed his work in 1945, designing models for disaster victims alongside René Gabriel . He then took up the project again with Jacques Dumond, designing model apartments for the Exposition internationale de l’urbanisme et de l’habitation in 1947.