As the saying goes, “Behind every great man stands a woman, rolling her eyes.” In the case of the Modernist architect Le Corbusier, that woman was probably Charlotte Perriand, his colleague and co-creator in the 1930s. Only she was probably too good-natured and well-mannered to roll her eyes. Perhaps from time to time she permitted herself a rueful smile.

On our last visit to Paris, we saw an exhibit of her furniture and photographs at le Petit Palais (whoch continues through September 18).

Charlotte, who was born in 1903 in Paris, studied at the l’Ecole de l’Union centrale des Arts décoratifs, and got a job after Le Corbusier saw her chrome-tube furniture, shown at the Salon d’automne in 1927. The installation was called Bar sous le toit (bar under the roof).
Actually, she had earlier applied to Le Corbusier for a job, thinking he might have a use for her training in the decorative arts, and he had turned her down with the dismissive comment, “Nous n’avons pas de broder coussins ici.” (We don’t embroider cushions here). It was the exhibit that made him change his mind. She was apparently gracious enough to overlook his earlier boorishness.

But what is more interesting is that the ensemble was not a prototype or a commission for someone else – it was something she had created for her own studio in the place St-Sulpice. Immediately you get a sense of who she was.

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