Sunday 13 April 2008

Back to basics


Moderne: Fashioning the French Interior
by Sarah Schleuning







Before colour photography in magazines there was the pochoir. Moderne is a catalogue of these sumptuous hand-coloured stencil brochures favoured by French designers of the 1920s. With the likes of Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Charlotte Perriand, and Eileen Gray represented this really is required reading.

More than two hundred plates, selected by Sarah Schleuning, a curator of the Wolfsonian Museum, and faithfully reproduced to preserve their original color palettes.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The coloring of these sketches is amazing. How lovely.

Suzy said...

It's a beautiful reference book.

The Peak of Chic said...

I really must read this book. Wasn't that a stylish period!

An Aesthete's Lament said...

Very, very, very swell, HOBAC! The last image looks precisely like a photograph. And the purple/fuschia office is pretty divine (a room for a fashion-magazine editor in chief surely rather than a titan of industry, don't you think?).

Easy and Elegant Life said...

As with fashion illustration a la Gruau, I wish there was more of this sort of thing.

HOBAC said...

So glad everyone liked this book. It really gives an opportunity to re-examine what modern means, or can mean as it was intended.