Design File 002: Jacques Adnet
Posted in: Design Files
In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of Tobia and Afra Scarpa.
Jacques Adnet (1900–1984): Born in Chatillion-Coligny, France
Jacques Adnet’s active career thrived for over five decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s, spanning the Jazz Age, the Machine Age, Functionalism, Art Deco, the International Style and midcentury modernism. His designs negotiated these surges with intelligence and subtlety; Adnet was never content to passively copy. He was inclined toward a pragmatic luxury, a tactile and rich reductivism.
Adnet stands with Jean Royère, André Arbus, Mathieu Matégot and Pierre Guariche as what is probably best called Post-Deco. These men opted to take Art Deco’s robust expressions and make them more simple and direct. In addition, they preserved Deco’s bespoke/artisanal fabrication, not giving in to the postwar industrial goadings. Adnet’s silhouettes are denuded of ancillary details but not dogmatically—that is, they are not reduced simply to make a point. But neither is there a tremendously idiosyncratic stamp; this is well-designed, aesthetically useful and high-quality furniture.
Above: Adnet lounge chairs from 1950. Top: A shelving unit circa 1950s
Left: A sling chair circa 1940s. Right: an armchair circa 1950s
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