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Jean Prouvé Mono­graph Box Set

c. 2017

by Jean Prouvé

Jean prouve book

This two-volume, slip­cased edition — curated by Galerie Patrick Seguin — revis­its and expands the orig­i­nal 2007 Jean Prouvé mono­graph, broad­en­ing its scope beyond archi­tec­ture to fully encom­pass his furni­ture designs. Newly conceived cover art and graph­ics frame a compre­hen­sive presen­ta­tion of each house shown by the gallery, illus­trated with archival mate­r­ial and contem­po­rary photog­ra­phy, along­side works drawn from private international collections.

The set also includes a complete cata­logue of Galerie Patrick Seguin’s Jean Prouvé exhi­bi­tions from 1990 to 2016, situ­at­ing the work within the gallery’s long-stand­ing engage­ment with his legacy.

Retain­ing the orig­i­nal volume’s inter­views with collec­tors and design special­ists, the publi­ca­tion is enriched by a detailed biog­ra­phy by Prouvé’s daugh­ter, Cather­ine Prouvé, and essays by Raymond Guidot and Cather­ine Coley. Together, the two volumes reflect Prouvé’s now widely recog­nized impor­tance to 20th-century design — his furni­ture conceived in direct dialogue with archi­tec­ture, in service of a modern art of living” and a coher­ent, humane vision of the built environment.

Jean Prouvé

France

Jean Prouvé built as if every object were a building, and every building an object. Born in Nancy in 1901 to an artist father and pianist mother, he trained first as a metalworker before turning his attention to architecture. That early discipline never left him. Whether designing a chair, a door, or an entire façade, Prouvé approached each as a problem of structure—how to make strength look light, how to let material speak for itself.

His Standard Chair of 1934 is perhaps the purest example: steel legs carrying the weight, wooden seat and back doing the rest. The logic is visible, almost pedagogical. The same thinking drove his prefabricated houses of the 1940s and ’50s—modular, portable, and decades ahead of their time.

For Prouvé, form was simply the consequence of engineering done right. His furniture and architecture still hold that tension between utility and grace: objects not designed to impress, but to endure. To handle one of his pieces is to feel both the weight of industry and the lightness of invention—modernism, not as theory, but as practice.

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