Editions Norma – serie

Gaetano Pesce traces the visionary collaboration between the Italian designer and American entrepreneur Jay Chiat, founder of the advertising agency Chiat\Day. Through 500 images, rare archives, and previously unpublished interviews, this book explores the creation of Chiat\Day’s New York offices—true laboratories of the virtual office concept. Conceived in the 1990s, this groundbreaking project merges art, architecture, and technology, redefining the very notion of workspace.From Venice to New York, the book situates this adventure within the career of a leading figure of radical design, for whom humanity and diversity remain central to every form of creation. Gaetano Pesce offers a richly documented and visually striking journey into the world of a total artist whose influence continues to shape the way we think about work, space, and creativity today.Text in English and French.

This exceptional anthology, which proposes a panorama of the evolution of crafts from 1945 to the present day, brings together a selection of over 70 texts from five continents. These texts are chosen and commented on by Chloé Braustein-Kriegel, a design specialist and critic, and Fabien Petiot, an art historian and designer.This new research is a genuine theoretical and practical tool for specialists and amateurs alike throughout the world. Calling on a huge network of experts, writers, critics, academics, journalists and artists, whose articles have been published in reviews such as Crafts Magazine, The Journal of Modern Art and The Journal of Design History, the authors present a diversity of viewpoints that permit the reader to go into depth on all the aspects of this multiform subject: the relationship between crafts and the many creation fields such as design and architecture, and the place of know-how in today's society. This anthology also makes it possible to place these contemporary questions in a historical perspective. A selection of authors: Charlotte Benton, Andrea Branzi, Alberto Cavalli, Garth Clark, Edmund Wim Delvoye, De Waal, Marie Douglas, Enzo Mari Stefano Micelli, Louise Schouwenberg, Patricia Woods.

Pierre Guariche (1926-1995) was a leading interior architect, furniture, and lighting designer in postwar France. He created a prolific body of work during what is known as the Thirty Glorious Years (1945-1975), a period of economic prosperity and high growth in France. He was an early adopter of industrial materials and production techniques that emerged during the 1950s, and is known for his remarkable lighting fixtures and simple, elegant furniture designs that could be manufactured on a large scale. He worked with innovative companies like Airborne, Steiner, and Pierre Disderot; he co-founded a design collective (Atelier de Recherche Plastique- ARP); and was the artistic director for the Meurop furniture company in Belgium. In advance of Charlotte Perriand in Les Arcs and Marcel Breuer in Flaine, he worked with the architect Michel Bezançon on the creation of La Plagne, the first comprehensive winter sports resort in France. Making use of unpublished archives, this book looks back on a rich itinerary of over 200 interior architecture and design projects, almost as many pieces of furniture, and a series of remarkable lighting fixtures (reissued today by Sammode) which shed light on the modernity and timeless elegance of this remarkable creator. Text in English and French.

A key figure in the Art Deco movement, artist Jean Dunand (1877-1942) stands out for his multiple talents as a sculptor, goldsmith, copper maker, but also lacquerer, bookbinder and decorator. After having excelled in finishing hammer-mounted vases and brassware, he met Seizo Sugawara in 1912 who led him to become passionate about lacquer, which he made his signature on both his vases and his panels, furniture and bindings.At the head of an important workshop, he participated in the major international exhibitions of his time, in Paris in 1925, 1931 and 1937, in New York in 1939, and was regularly exhibited at the Georges Petit gallery and at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. His singularity and the quality of his creations lead him to become one of the most sought-after portrait painters, immortalising personalities in fashion and the arts such as Jeanne Lanvin, Louise Boulanger, Joséphine Baker as well as from the world of finance such as the Lazards, Carnegie or Louis-Dreyfus.Jean Dunand also worked on remarkable sets in France and the United States such as the music salons of Solomon R. Guggenheim, the apartments of Madame Agnès or Templeton Croker, as well as on the shipyards of the Atlantic and Normandy liners which will crown a rich career of more than two thousand works, presented in a repertoire at the end of the book.Text in French.

A real mirror of 20th century creation, Chess Design presents an exceptional documentation on chess games made by artists, designers, architects, and craftsmen: chessboards themselves, but also artist's drawings, execution plans and photographs of archives.By presenting nearly 300 of these chessboards chronologically, the author offers a new perspective on the history of art and its evolution. Art Nouveau, Secession, Surrealism, Fluxus, Pop Art, most of the great movements that are born and follow one another in the Fine Arts find an echo with these chessboards and the 16 pieces that animate them. These chess games also reflect the evolution of techniques and materials used during this period: wood, glass, ceramics will give way, from the 1950s, to steel, plastic and composite materials.At the border between the plastic arts and the decorative arts, these chessboards are made by big names in the art scene, design or architecture – Alexandre Rodchenko, Jean-Michel Frank, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, or, more recently, Yoko Ono, Robert Filliou, Yayo Kusama, Victor Vasarely, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry or Damien Hirst – as by anonymous people. The synthesis offered by the author constitutes a valuable and innovative historian's work, supported by iconography that is both rich and mostly unpublished.Text in English and French.

The life of Gustave Caillebotte is shrouded in legend - untimely death, hidden genius, generous patron of Monet, Pissaro, Sisley and Degas - making him one of the most appreciated and mysterious painters of the Impressionist movement. This biography, written by a descendant of the painter, journalist and producer of programs on France Culture, is illustrated with numerous previously unpublished photographic documents. It takes a detailed look at Gustave Caillebotte's history and career, placing his pictorial work in the context of his family, social and economic environment, for the life of Gustave Caillebotte is above all a lesson in history and geography, that of the Parisian bourgeoisie under the Second Empire and the blossoming of the Impressionist movement in the Ile-de-France region. The biography describes Gustave's father Martial Caillebotte's meteoric rise in the textile industry, his education and pictorial training in Bonnat's studio and at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, his participation in the 1870 war at the age of 22, and his decisive encounter with the Impressionist group, led by Renoir, Monet and Degas. Thanks in particular to family archives, the book revisits Caillebotte's decisive role in the diffusion of the movement, including the organisation of the group's third exhibition, as well as the genesis and presentation of his own works, including the famous Raboteur.

Georges Jouve (1910–1964) was a major postwar decorative-arts figure who liberated ceramics from academic rules. Nicknamed “Apollo,” he tirelessly explored relationships between form, material, and light, combining utility and ornament, rigour and play. His wide stylistic range—from realism to abstraction—and his signature black glaze quickly set him apart. This illustrated book traces his career from Nyons and Dieulefit to Aix-en-Provence, highlighting iconic pieces such as cylindrical vases and his collaborations with Janette Laverrière, Étienne Noël, and Mathieu Matégot, including La Saladière and the hotel La Résidence in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Present in the major Salons of his time, Jouve emerged as an agent of modernity and, encouraged by Charlotte Perriand, joined the Steph Simon gallery. Equally at ease with small or monumental formats, he produced vases, fountains, tables, and sculptures, using zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, and abstract forms to make ceramics a vibrant, experimental, and timeless modern art, with lasting appeal worldwide today.Text in English and French.

Miró – Loeb. Correspondence 1926–1936 reveals the exceptional relationship between Joan Miró and Pierre Loeb, his gallerist and close friend in Paris. Through previously unpublished letters, richly illustrated with Miró’s works and facsimiles, the book traces a decade of exchanges during which exhibitions, collaborations, and new visions of modern art took shape. This vivid and illuminating correspondence captures the daily life of an artist and a dealer at the heart of the cultural ferment of the interwar years. It offers a glimpse into the realities of the gallery world, the networks of friendship, and the evolving dialogue between artistic creation and its dissemination in a time of profound transformation. The volume is accompanied by texts by Albert and Sonia Loeb, which place these exchanges within their human and historical context, offering a sensitive perspective on a relationship that proved decisive for both modern art and the life of Parisian galleries in the twentieth century.Text in English and French.

Born into the American aristocracy, Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux abandoned high society to pursue an artistic career. Starting her training with Constantin Brancusi, she then arrived in Paris in 1919, following her marriage to French diplomat and writer Pierre de Lanux. She soon met the designer Eileen Gray. Eyre took over Gray's research on laquer and continued experimenting with innovative materials not previously used in furniture, namely cork, amber and linoleum. With Evelyn Wyld, she created a literary universe in which the poetry of her rugs, blended with furniture and lamps in totally new ways, all in an environment of muted shades and modern comfort. An ambitious artist in the Surrealist Paris of the interwar years, she wanted to believe in a peaceful future. But the crash of 1929 and World War II sounded the death knell for the career of this fresh new talent, ensuring that her creations became the rarest of objects. A bridge between the pioneering Eileen Gray and the rational Charlotte Perriand, like them, Eyre de Lanux drew inspiration from Japonism. Neither poor, nor stripped bare, her rare architectured interiors have remained secret until now. Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux is a recognised name but a forgotten talent. With Eileen Gray, Eyre de Lanux, Charlotte Perriand and Maria Pergay, the four cardinal points have now been identified.

This book is a unique and comprehensive illustrated dictionary of French Art Nouveau Ceramics.A census conducted in 1901 indicated the existence of some 209 producers of pottery in France, employing a total of around 5,800 full-time labourers. This great activity stimulated a parallel development in the arts, including the search for new expressions in art pottery, giving birth to l'art nouveau, a great and eclectic synthesis of a number of other art styles. Largely through British arts and crafts, and the work of artists like the Manxman Archibald Knox, it reached far back into the prehistory of Celtic art. To this were added later medieval elements, through the gothic revival championed by William Morris.The need for renewal, breaking away from the neo-Classical and academia, which was the realm of the upper-class culture, was largely theorised by John Ruskin, who searched elsewhere for inspiration. Thus did British art nouveau also partake of Chinese and Japanese styles, though never in so forceful a manner as did the French aesthetic. France, on the one side, looked back to the swirling and frivolous eighteenth century Rococo, primarily through the influence of the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, influential aesthetes of the mid-nineteenth century.The book focuses especially on artists working stoneware or grès, faience, and terracotta. It aims to provide a general survey of the many artists working in these areas, and includes brief accounts of the ceramics work of sculptors and painters whose wider output is already well known.

Alfred Auguste Janniot (1889-1969), a renowned French sculptor of the inter-war period, left his mark on his contemporaries through his monumental work, which embraced and magnified architecture, both in France and other countries. His two main works, the spectacular bas-reliefs for the Musée permanent des colonies (1931) and the Palais de Tokyo (1937), still resonate in people's minds today. He also took part in the great adventure of the transatlantic liners, working on Île-de-France (1926) and Normandie (1935).Winner of the Grand Prix de Rome in 1919, Janniot worked alongside some of the greatest architects, collaborating with Roger Séassal, Michel Roux-Spitz, Albert Laprade, Jacques d'Welles, Wallace Harrison, Jean Niermans and Pierre Patout. Whether round-bosses or monumental "stone tapestries", his many works reveal the artist's classical training acquired at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as well as an abundant creativity that can be seen at the town hall in Puteaux (1932-1934), the Chamber of Commerce in Châteauroux (1934), the Maison Française at Rockefeller Center in New York (1934), the Bourse du Travail in Bordeaux (1935-1938) and the Villa Greystones in Dinard (1938-1950).Text in French.

As early as 1934 Charlotte Perriand began to reflect on the architectural aspects of leisure activities for all, but it was with Les Arcs, her greatest work, that she completed her reflection on the art of living in the mountains.Alongside the developer Roger Godino, Charlotte Perriand displayed all the facets of her immense talent: design, urban planning, but also bioclimatic architecture, of which she was a pioneer. She had to deal with financial and time constraints in order to design most of the Arc 1600 and 1800. Thanks to her perseverance and growing inventiveness, her integration of architecture into the sites, her innovative and human approach to traffic, and the life she breathes into the resort, especially on the rooftops, she has made it a friendly place, in harmony with the environment. Thus, she designs the interior architecture of more than 4,500 homes, 25,000 beds, for an annual flow of more than one million people. Her wish to combine the art of living in the mountains with housing for the greatest number of people has been largely realised.Text in French.

This beautifully illustrated book of avant-garde art furniture design highlights a generation of creators whose energy and vision made a break with the past. Profiled here are Mark Brazier-Jones, Franck Evennou, Elizabeth Garouste, Marco de Gueltzl, Hubert Le Gall, Thierry Peltrault, Laurence Picot, Andrea Salvetti, and Claude de Wulf. All have been represented since the 1980s by Elisabeth Delacarte, whose Galerie Avant-Scène in Paris continues its mission of promoting these and other extraordinary furniture and jewellery designers to this day.Text in English and French.