Andrée Putman

Andrée Putman (23 December 1925 – 19 January 2013) was a French interior and product designer.

Life and work Childhood and youth (1925–1944)

Andrée Christine Aynard was born into a wealthy family of bankers and notables from Lyon. Her paternal grandfather, Edouard Aynard, founded the Maynard & Sons Bank; her paternal grandmother, Rose de Montgolfier, was a descendant of the hot-air balloon inventors' family. Her father was a graduate from the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure who spoke seven languages but swore to a life of austerity and seclusion to protest against his own milieu; her mother, Louise Saint-René Taillandier, was a concert pianist who found comfort in the frivolity of "being a great artist without a stage."

Her formal artistic education first came, however, through music. Her mother took her and her sister to concerts and urged them to learn the piano. But she was later told that her hands were not suited to the piano and, as a consequence, she would never be a virtuoso. She then switched her focus to studying composition at the National Conservatory of Paris. At the age of nineteen, she received the First Harmony Prize of the Conservatory from Francis Poulenc himself.

Professional beginnings (1945–1978) At the age of 20 she had a serious bike accident, which she barely survived. Her characteristic posture stemmed from this event: she was a tall woman who stood straight and walked as if on a tightrope. Soon after the accident, she broke free from her initial career in music and from the illusion of safety her social environment offered her and decided to discover the world. One day, she emptied her bedroom and furnished it with just a hard iron bed, a chair and a Miró poster on the white walls. This early expression of her desire of independence led to a confrontation with her family who wondered "if she realises the sorrow she makes them feel?"

In 1958, Putman collaborated with the retail chain Prisunic as Art Director of the Home Department, where her motto was to "design beautiful things for nothing". Her wish of making art available to a larger public also became a reality through Prisunic as she organised with her husband editions of lithographs by famous artists sold for only 100 Francs (1,73 €). Her intuition led her to reveal many talented designers such as Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Issey Miyake, Ossie Clark, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler. It is at that moment that she went into interior design as she converted the former SNCF premises into a showroom and offices for the company.

Ecart (1978–1995) In the late 1970s, Créateurs & Industriels went bankrupt; Putman got divorced.

The interior design of the Morgans Hotel in New York in 1984 marked a turning point in Andrée Putman's career: she managed to make a high-standard hotel with a small budget and asserted her style with sober rooms and visual effects. "Because I started working in New York, the French suddenly asked for me." the Morgans Hotel in Manhattan, and the Blue Spa at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich. In 2005, Guerlain chooses the Studio Putman to re-design its flagship store on the Champs Elysées. Among notable private commissions are the Pagoda House in Tel Aviv, the vast SoHo penthouse for Serge and Tatiana Sorokko, and a cliff-house in Tangier for Bernard-Henri Lévy and Arielle Dombasle, for whom Putman completely restructured the building.

In 2007, a new era began as Andrée's daughter Olivia Putman agreed to take over the Art Direction of the Studio, a wish its founder had expressed for a long time. "We realised that time and Andrée's fame had turned our family name into an adjective. Qualified in History of Art and landscape architecture, Olivia wishes to perpetuate the eclecticism and curiosity her mother always claimed." In 2008, Paris Mayor Bertand Delanoë made Andrée President of the first Paris Design Committee, which aims at rethinking street furniture, Parisian public equipments and employees' uniforms. That same year, she presented Voie Lactée ("Milky Way"), the grand piano she designed for France's oldest piano manufacturer Pleyel and unveiled Entrevue, her creation for Bisazza at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. In June, the store she designed for fashion designer Anne Fontaine in New York was inaugurated, following the ones designed in Paris and Tokyo.

Death Putman died at her apartment in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, on 19 January 2013, aged 87.

Awards 2009 – Best designer, voted by 4000 journalists