Jean Prouvé | Furniture for sale, auction results and history

Jean Prouvé was a French metalworker, designer and self-taught architect, whose idealistic designs blended art with engineering.

Furniture such as his Potence lamp, Tabouret Haut bar stool and Antony chair remain classics of high-design interiors today, but for Prouvé, design was primarily a tool for improvement. His economic and efficient, modular pieces were mass-produced for homes, hospitals and schools throughout Europe after World War II.

His Demountable House — a home that could be erected by two people in a single day — was used to address housing shortages in Niger and the Republic of Congo, the French colonies.

The son of a painter and a pianist, Prouvé was born in Paris in 1901, but grew up in Nancy. At 15, his family’s bankruptcy forced him to apprentice as a metalworker. He studied subsequently under the craftsman Adalbert Szabo in Paris and early pieces include a base for a vase by his godfather, the Art Nouveau sculptor Emile Gallé.

By 1924, Prouvé had set up on his own, opening a wrought iron forge in Nancy that produced gates and chandeliers. His encounter with Modernism at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, though, convinced him that his future lay in sheet steel and aluminium.

Prouvé became a founding member of the prestigious Union des artistes modernes (UAM) in 1929. In 1931, he created Atelier Jean Prouvé, pioneering bold, lightweight metal furniture that was often inspired by engineering, such as an adjustable reclining armchair. Large commissions followed, such as a bus station for Citroën in Paris.

Though Prouvé favoured the public sector, which better fitted his socialist ideals (he liked to refer to his workers as compagnons — a term meaning both ‘friend’ and ‘craftsman’), Prouvé sometimes collaborated with other Modernist designers: in 1937, for instance, he provided a bathroom unit for a project by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand.

Prouvé's factory was taken over by Aluminium Français in 1953. One of his last creations was the Antony, a small armchair with a curved wooden shell and metal base, for the Cité Universitaire in Antony, near Paris.

From 1957, he taught at the Parisian Conservatoire National des Arts et Métier, where his lectures were standing room only, and served as consulting engineer on various architectural projects in Paris. In 1971, he chaired the competition jury for the Centre Pompidou.

Prouvé died in 1984. In 2002, in cooperation with the Prouvé family, Vitra began to issue re-editions of his designs. Examples of his work are held by museums including the Pompidou and MoMA New York.