JEAN ROYÈRE | "FLAQUE" COFFEE TABLE

Private Collection

Audap & Mirabaud, November 25, 2011, lot 210 bis

Acquired from the above by the present owner

"Sous les tropiques," Le Décor d’Aujourd’hui, October 1953, p. 124

Pierre Kjellberg, Le Mobilier du XX^eme Siècle, Paris, 1994, p. 558

Jean Royère: décorateur à Paris, exh. cat., Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 1999, p. 161

Galerie Jacques Lacoste and Galerie Patrick Seguin, eds., Jean Royère: Volume 1, Paris, 2012, p. 240

Galerie Jacques Lacoste and Galerie Patrick Seguin, eds., Jean Royère: Volume 2, Paris, 2012, pp. 58 and 299

“As a decorator I am against decoration, in the sense that everything that is strictly decorative is what goes out of style the fastest. When you’ve got a well-designed piece of furniture, the form and volume live on,” said Jean Royère in a 1963 interview for the Revue de l’Ameublement magazine. Royère, a self-taught designer with international reach, achieved tremendous popularity in the mid-20th century for his avant-garde and playful approach to furniture design. Using bright colors, sinuous contours and noble materials, Royère contributed to defining our contemporary understanding of a creative and international mid-century style. His use of free forms especially was revolutionary in many regards, drawing inspiration from the curves of Art Nouveau architecture and the simplicity of contemporary Scandinavian design. An emblematic example of Royère’s free-spirited approach to his craft is the decoration of the apartment he occupied on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the late 1940s. Immortalized in a photograph from 1947, the living room featured a “Boule” sofa coexisting with a variant of the “Flaque” low table with three perforated metal feet and an opaline glass top. Together, these two iconic works formed a central focal point in the room and participated in the creation of a particularly harmonious interior defined by wavy lines and gentle curves that embody the essence of the designer’s timeless style. The low table was first presented to the public at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1949. A rapid commercial success, the table became one of Royère’s most iconic and influential designs, and a blueprint for future versions in different sizes, colors and materials. Four years later, he designed a variant of the model with undulating, gilt-iron feet and ball-shaped decorations; and in 1954, introduced a version in marquetry that he presented at the Salon des Arts Ménagers. The model is now particularly rare and highly prized amongst collectors of mid-century French design. Another version of the model is held in the permanent collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.