Pierre Paulin, the designer of modernity and French elegance who knew the vocabulary of style, flatly asserted that he loathed all that was hard. In this case, he was talking about the walls and partitions of dwellings and reception spaces.
His most famous seats (the Oyster, the Tongue, the Tulip), as well as the salons of the Élysée palace and the other places he worked on, are often structured as very soft textile cells. He took a keen interest in rugs as ‘places of life’ and very successfully used soft materials that enveloped the body. What, then, can one say about the table, a necessarily hard object if it is to fulfil its basic function? Pierre Paulin designed many throughout his career. They assumed very different forms which were often marked by their period and the materials chosen.
When Pierre Paulin was starting his career after the war, he looked to the North and its simple and honest modernity. Wood, the simplest and yet not the most abundant material, structured this vision, which consisted of sober and elegant designs. Here the notion of ‘fitting out’ seems all-important: on the one hand, the designer thought of the relationship to the exact functions of the work of work and its offices, and on the other anticipated the widening of domestic usages and habits in developing elegant writing desks and highly practical coffee tables.
It’s by evolving towards new materials that the designer takes the seed of the Nordic tradition and combines it with flexibility of plastic or fibreglass. He forms the alliance of modernity and motifs: by using glass for tabletops, Paulin reveals that structurally speaking, base and motif can intertwine, and that decoration is not an appendage of the table but an essential part of it. In so doing, he disrupts, in a modern way, the French decorative tradition and brings this language close to that of architecture. He thus takes a step to viewing the base as a ‘piece’ in its own right. It is no longer merely a question of the steady central leg which supports a tabletop that hides it, but on the contrary the revelationofthisessentialarchitecturewhichorganisesthe stability of a table.
We can perhaps relate to this work, though the fluidity of the procedures which bring together designs and materials, the textile flexibility that was so dear to Paulin. It is common among creators for one idea to lead to another, but with Pierre Paulin the periods seem to be part of a sequence, and at first blush almost separate, their methods sometimes diametrically opposed. This is only partly true: one sees in the transitions from one period to another the clarity of their constructive logics. The tables are an emanation, at once fluctuating and ungraspable, of the games that theircreator played: the table is a central pillar of cultures, and this is what the work of Pierre Paulin implicitly tells us.
Catherine Geel
