Jacques Adnet

Among the great figures of twentieth-century French design, Jacques Adnet built a bridge between the refinement of the French decorative tradition and the clarity of modernism. Over a career of more than four decades, from the heyday of Art Deco to the post-war years, he developed a language of rare poise, spare yet warm and rigorous yet sensual, crowned by his celebrated designs in saddle-stitched leather. As director of the Compagnie des Arts Français and later of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, he shaped not only the objects of his time but the designers who followed, and his work remains a byword for understated French elegance.

Jacques Adnet was born in 1900 in Châtillon-Coligny, in the Loiret, alongside his twin brother Jean. So closely were the two linked in their early creative years that their work long bore a shared signature, "J.J. Adnet". The brothers trained together at the École nationale des arts décoratifs in Paris before joining La Maîtrise, the design studio of the Galeries Lafayette, then under the direction of Maurice Dufrêne, a master of a robust and opulent Art Deco. It was there that they learned their craft, and under that banner that they exhibited at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs of 1925, the very exhibition that would later lend Art Deco its name.

The twins' paths then diverged. Jean turned to window display and commercial decoration, while in 1928 Jacques took the helm of the Compagnie des Arts Français, the house founded by Louis Süe and André Mare, which was then in difficulty and whose modern furnishings still carried echoes of the eighteenth century. He was not yet thirty. Rather than simply inheriting an institution, he reshaped it. In place of the founders' lingering neoclassicism, he brought a spare, lithe and resolutely modern language, bringing industrial materials such as metal and glass together with rare woods and refined finishes like parchment and shagreen. He would lead the house for some thirty years.

The 1930s saw him explore chromed metal, glass and mirror. His tubular lighting and his collaborations with Baccarat speak of a luminous, almost architectural modernity, while pieces such as his faux-bamboo side tables and deep club chairs reveal a lighter, more convivial register. After the war his vocabulary grew warmer, and it was then that he arrived at the signature for which he is celebrated today: slender metal frames clad in leather, finished with saddle stitching and paired with brass. Working in association with Hermès in the 1950s, he applied this idiom to chairs, lamps, desks and other pieces, bringing to the interior a sense of tailoring that belonged as much to the world of fashion as to that of furniture.

His standing brought official commissions, among them schemes for the Élysée Palace under the presidency of Vincent Auriol. In 1959 he crowned his career by becoming director of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, the very school that had trained him, a post he held until 1970. He died in 1984, remembered as a designer who brought modernity and the tradition of French luxury into dialogue without ever sacrificing one to the other.