Chair by Robert Mallet Stevens, 1930

Robert  Mallet-Stevens 1886-1945

French Architect (b Paris, 24 March 1886; d Paris, 8 Feb 1945). Architect,
designer and writer. His father, Maurice Mallet, was an important paintings
dealer and appraiser, and one of the first to promote the work of Impressionist
painters. While studying at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris (1903–6),
Robert Mallet-Stevens frequently visited his family in Brussels, where he
observed the construction of the Palais Stoclet (1905–11), designed by Josef
Hoffmann for Mallet-Stevens’s uncle, Baron Stoclet. Hoffmann’s influence can
be seen in Mallet-Stevens’s earliest designs for villas such as the Ecorcheville
house (1914; 2nd version, Paris, Mus. A. Déc.). The graphic style of the villa
design, the smooth white façades and rigorous geometry of the masses were
derived from the Palais Stoclet. Mallet-Stevens’s series of drawings for city
buildings (1917) were similar in style and were published as Une Cité
moderne (1922). His villa at Hyères (1923–6; see FRANCE, fig. 14) for Charles,
Vicomte de Noailles, revealed a style that had been influenced by contact with
the De Stijl group. Simple prisms project laterally, in a series of terraces, from
a central staircase that acts as the vertical counter-weight to the composition.
Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Jozseph Czaky and Constantin Brancusi
were chosen by Mallet-Stevens to provide the bas-reliefs and other sculptures
for the villa. In 1928 the villa was used as the film set for Les Mystères du
château du dé by Man Ray.