LIKE AN experienced model, Andree Putman sits on the edge of a chair, carefully crossing one shapely black-hosed leg over another. Her carriage suggests she is perpetually posed for the camera, although her meticulous mannerisms, such as the aristocratic way she wields a demitasse cup, are by no means an affectation.
She is striking: A pouf of strawberry blond hair veils one eye; her trademark black garb is belted to show off a superb figure; her voice is surprisingly deep and throaty. There is a severity about her appearance. Her chalky face, even more startling with her pencil-arched eyebrows and crimson lipstick, bear the tracks of past travails.
If she appears ascetic and intimidating, her gentle blue eyes dispel the sternness.
Her presence is arresting.
Here in a Chicago shop sits the woman who has been hailed as Paris` most significant force in interior design. She is the grande dame of the lost modern masterpiece. Her Paris-based firm, Ecart International, has reproduced the ahead-of-their-time chairs of Rene Herbst and Robert Mallet-Stevens, the rugs of Eileen Gray and the lamps of Mariano Fortuny, plucking some of them from half a century of obscurity.
”All of these were people with vision,” she says of the early 20th-Century designers whose avant-garde works are unequivocally accepted–now –as masterpieces. ”They were very lonely. They didn`t care much for success. They all were like poets dreaming in their own corner.”
Most, in their lifetimes, went unheralded. ”When Eileen Gray made the
`Transat` chair in 1927, she was absolutely bombarded with aggressive words,” Putman says. ”People thought she was insane. They wrote mean things about her.”
PUTMAN ONCE had an opportunity to meet Gray, who was then in her 90s.
”She got a flu and I was so unhappy to have missed her because she died shortly after,” she recalls.
”But then I was asked to reproduce some of her rugs. Thinking what an optimist I am that at least 10 people might be interested, I chose the one,
`Black Board,` which I now use as the cover of my catalogue.”
That was the debut of Ecart International in 1978. Putman teamed up with architect Jean-Francois Bodin, who since has moved on.
Though the last six years have been uphill, in 1983 the firm turned out about 10,000 objects, each one faithful to its original design. Their intent is not inspired by nostalgia, ”but a direct plan of returning to circulation these important works of great artists,” Putman says.
”It`s amazing that suddenly people have decided to respect the success of these artists. It happened practically overnight. Stuart Johnson, the curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, helped me enormously with an exhibition,” she says.
The pieces, ranging in price from $200 to $5,000, are available in Chicago at City, 213 W. Institute Pl., where Putman recently visited. Ecart International`s ingenious, perfectly timed marketing has turned her into something of a design whirlwind in this country, though long ago she cut a swath through Paris.
SHE IS a design superstar. She has created shops and homes for French fashion moguls Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint-Laurent and Claude Montana. Vogue magazine recently devoted 11 pages to her. Last month Vanity Fair singled her out as a decorator who has turned ”plainness into ravishing style . . .In her hands, checkerboards are no longer square.”
She eschews the inevitable label of tastemaker.
”I don`t like the word. First of all, I don`t believe in it,” Putman said. ”Good taste, bad taste, what is it? You know all these pieces from
— what was the terrible crisis in America?–the Depression. There were very inexpensive cups and glasses, probably (considered) very ugly at the time,”
she says of the characteristic tableware of the era that is now avidly collected in America.
”Why is it these pieces are fascinating today? Because their color is like a pastel rainbow. They were done with some charm. They are not gloomy.” Nor is Putman gloomy, despite her predilection for black. That she doesn`t take all of the hoopla associated with ”design” to heart is evident from her wit and personal style, such as wearing plastic bangles from the 1930s with her couturier dress. Indeed, Putman made her reputation for designing with the unexpected: flea-market items paired with antique treasures, lace with leather.
”You know, you have to have a kind of genius to mix the worst things,”
she said. ”I think design has been taken too seriously.”
SHE TAKES TO task the ”popes” of design. ”They are not too much into life,” she explains. ”All these people are too intense in the way they look at the world.”
Not that she hasn`t been accused of having a few eccentricities of her own. Her friends were puzzled in 1965 when she bought the Art Deco chairs of Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, which were then decidedly out of style. She chose to move from her elegant, embellished 17th-Century apartment to a High Tech loft in a former bottle factory.
”I think I didn`t mind at all to shock all these people,” Putman says.
”I have always been very intense. Perhaps a little wild. But spontaneous ideas can be very creative.”
Growing up in the `30s and `40s on the Left Bank probably set the tone for this creativity. Her family was well-to-do and cultured–to a fault.
”My grandfather was a wealthy banker, a little bit of a genius. He had 12 children. He had one of the greatest antique art collections in France.
”I was the second daughter of a very late second marriage of my father,” who died when she was a child. ”There was an enormous gap of generations. I was brought up in the image of an abbey of the 12th Century
–Roman curves and austerity. It was all about art and books. We had a rich past because of my grandfather and the fury of his collection.
”My father used seven languages. He was interested in art and 19th-Century Russian literature. His world was very classic, boring in his way. He was, how do you say, intensely curious about the culture of the world.”
She describes her mother as a brilliant pianist, having an amazing personality, ”someone who could do anything.”
Andree`s immersion in art left little room for a real childhood. ”My sister and I were taken to exhibitions and concerts too early. It was like pushing us to what they (my parents) thought was essential,” she says.
THOUGH SHE trained to be a concert pianist, to pursue the career her mother never realized, at 21 she abandoned music. Composer Francis Poulenc thought he was encouraging her when he suggested she study more intensely for another 10 years.
Putman balked, to the amazement and probable horror of all who knew her. She needed more stimulation than she would get spending 10 years in cloistered piano chambers.
Instead, she ended up creating displays for a department store. It was the beginning of her brilliant career.
Her displays were a jarring departure from the norm of that era. ”I sold only to poor people. At the time what was offered to basic people was absolutely a shame. It was extremely ornate.”
Putman instead promoted clean, simple lines, plain white instead of gilt. The Versailles look in its many forms was distasteful to her. She preferred Art Deco to Louis XV.
But she was making waves to a limited audience. She always sought the approval of her husband, art critic Jacques Putman, to whom she was married for 18 years. She describes the end of their stormy relationship as ”totally trauamtic.”
And a major influence on her life.
”My life was not just my own, but something we had created together. My ex-husband is a devil of intelligence and sensitivity. He thought I was talented. But when a man cares immensely for you, he wants to keep you and make you think you are lost without him.”
AFTER THE divorce, she left her Old World house, with its ”enormous ceilings and beautiful proportions,” for the funky bottle factory that she had been eyeing.
”I was then in a mix of fine old things from my parents. Clean, beautiful Knoll furniture. A Mies (Van der Rohe) chair. A (Harry) Bertoia bench. A piece by (Alvar) Aalto. I mixed modern art and pieces from the 17th Century. I used inexpensive fabrics, like those primitives from Africa. I always mix the poor and the rich.”
She longed to live in the loft. ”I was just dying for that space,”
Putman says. ”I loved the proportions, the metal columns, the fun details, the big, bold beams.”
Putman furnished her new space sparsely. ”There was practically nothing in it. A bed, a table and four chairs. At the time I decided I did not want any objects ever. It was bizarre.” Eventually, of course, the loft was transformed to a glamorous black, white and silver set–filled, as she says, with ”very amusing collections.”
Putman was comfortable in the style that has come to be known as High Tech, noticed in this country long after Putman had embraced it.
”What is High Tech if not the beauty of the poor?” she asks.
”Factories where people work and sweat. Artists discovered lofts because the beauty of the space is essential. They must breathe.”
PUTMAN WAS pleased to see ”her” style gain a popular following, though with reservations. ”Trends are so dangerous because many people take the word and obey it blindly,” she says. ”Already in Europe there are terrible things called High Tech that are stupid copies. What is killing design is all the ideas of seriousness. Clumsiness.
”People are prisoners of ideas they have received by school or their parents. It`s a universal education that somehow kills the genuine approach, the freedom to put something really ugly in a room because it tells a story. Something very structured can be wonderful, but not very livable. The freedom to mix is absolutely life.”
Her eye for that ”mix” gradually evolved into her interior design credits and the founding of Ecart International. In promoting the
furnishings, Putman spends a fair amount of time in this country. Her visit to Chicago was a brief one, and it was drawing to a close. A limo was waiting. The few hours she had spent here, at a party in her honor at City, had been exhilarating.
”The (Mayfair Regent) hotel, they have sent flowers and champagne. It`s too nice. Last night I met a lady from Ohio with all her family who canceled plans to go to Europe so she could meet me. One girl insisted to talk seriously about how I had totally changed her life. This was not just a welcome to Chicago. It was much more than that. And, of course, that makes me very happy.
”I will never completely understand it. It makes me more cautious, brings more stage fright to my work. But it is not spoiling me. It has quite the opposite effect, I think.”
Although she relishes this position, she accepts it with caution.
”If I were a teacher I would never try to have my pupils use a pattern, a recipe. I would work like Lee Strasberg`s acting studio. I would urge: Be one`s self. But with a degree of attitude. That is rich.”
