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Imitation, Design Networks and 1920s French Art Deco
Architecture & Design NOW series featuring John Potvin
March 17 | Room L1060 | Library building
Free admission, everyone welcome

Dr. John Potvin joins us via zoom in L1060 for this lecture.

Countless are the tomes that have centred around or critically examined the complicated relationship between modern art and African masks and sculptures. However, a comparable examination of the relationship between African material culture and the design of the early twentieth-century modern interior has yet to be undertaken. This lecture explores what I identify as a specific design network that resided as the heart of a series of interconnected, suggestive triangulations. The first triangulation is developed through the generative relationships between couturier Jacques Doucet, modiste Jeanne Tachard and ensemblier Pierre Legrain. As a network that enabled collaboration, inspiration and creation it exposes a significant second triangulation between Orientalism, lifestyle modernism and primitivism. Through a meticulous and alchemical processes of colonization, domestication, translation and assimilation the design network provided a space in which Legrain produced ‘unique’, bespoke copies of historical African prototypes, transforming them into the uniquely French examples of art deco design.

Dr John Potvin is Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches on the intersections of art, design and fashion. His books include: Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding (2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013), Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014), winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize and most recently Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris (2020).He is currently working a manuscript for Manchester University Press, Claiming Decoration!: Gender, Modernism and the Profession of Interior Design and in 2021 was awarded a four-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant to investigate ‘Primitivism and Design: Art Deco, Hybridity and the Decolonization of the Modern Interior in France 1909-1939’.

Images: (left) Jacques Doucet, first floor studio. L’Illustration, ‘Le studio de Jacques Doucet’, L'Illustration, 3 May 1930. (right) Salon de la maison de Jeanne Tachard, La Celle Saint Cloud, from L’Amour de l’art, 1924. Images courtesy of the speaker.