André Sornay

André Sornay was one of the most inventive French designers of the twentieth century, and the great modernist of Lyon. Working far from the Parisian limelight, he developed a language of rigorous geometry and hidden ingenuity, and devised a patented technique of brass-nail construction, known as cloutage, in which structure and ornament became one. His furniture, at once refined, rational and strikingly original, has earned him a place among the most admired figures of French modernism, and his work is today eagerly sought by collectors and celebrated in museum exhibitions.

André Sornay was born in Lyon on 28 January 1902 into a family of furniture merchants. His grandfather, Claudius Sornay, had come to Lyon from a modest family in the Beaujolais, starting as an apprentice upholsterer in a small furniture business that he came to own in 1868 and specialising in furnishing textiles. The young André entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 1917, in the decoration section. When his father died in 1919, he found himself, at the age of seventeen, at the head of the family firm.

He wasted no time in transforming it. In 1920 he abandoned period furniture and began to create pieces of pure, modern line. Close in spirit to Francis Jourdain and Pierre Chareau, and responsive to the ideas of the Bauhaus and De Stijl, he sought to adapt furniture to its function while giving it a resolutely new aesthetic. He first exhibited in public at the Salon de l'ameublement in Lyon in 1922. His early work consisted of unique pieces in rich veneers, but his ambitions soon reached further. He conceived complete interiors with built-in panelling, movable partitions and multi-purpose furniture whose shelves, flaps and concealed mechanisms intensified their usefulness. In 1927, with the architect Louis Thomas, he furnished the apartment of F. Maire, president of the Salon d'Automne, integrating the furniture entirely into the interior architecture. The following year he introduced tubular metal seating and synthetic Duco lacquer, and became the leading figure of the avant-garde in Lyon.

After 1930 Sornay set out to create more affordable furniture, and his research into plywood and assembly led to the invention that would make his name. He patented a system of furniture panels and their method of assembly, in which veneered plywood panels were fixed to their structure with small pins of brass, copper or aluminium. The lines of nails served both to hold the plywood and to decorate it, so that the technical process itself generated the aesthetic effect. Pieces made in this way were stamped Sornay, Breveté France Étranger. At the same time he gradually set aside Macassar ebony in favour of Oregon pine, a wood then unknown to classical cabinetmaking. In 1937 his peers chose him to represent the city of Lyon at the Exposition internationale in Paris, where his desk L'Ensemblier won a bronze medal.

The Second World War marked a turning point. Faced with shortages and a decline in the quality of materials, Sornay refined the standardisation of his production and developed knock-down furniture with a rapid assembly system, which he also patented. In 1950 he invented the tigette Sornay, a fixing that joined elements of furniture together. In the 1950s and 1960s his work became more industrial and often modular, occasionally incorporating rubber or coloured wooden panels, and alongside his furniture he designed several modernist houses in Lyon.

André Sornay died in Vichy on 7 August 2000. In 2004 his work was the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a fitting recognition for a designer whose quiet, uncompromising modernism had long awaited its due.