Raymond Subes

Raymond Henri Subes ( – ) was a French decorative artist specializing in ironwork. Generally associated with the Art Deco movement, he has been referred to as one of the greatest French ironworkers of the 20th century. who had just cofounded the Borderel & Robert company in Paris together with industrialist Ernest Borderel.

During World War I, Subes served in light infantry, was wounded on at Audun-le-Roman, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre and Médaille militaire for having rescued his wounded captain. He was wounded again and demobilized in 1916.

From then, Subes worked in a workshop that Émile Robert had established in Enghien-les-Bains near Paris, where he acquired his metalworking skills. He married Adrienne Valadié (1895–1963). They had three children, André (1921–1985), Jacques (1924–2002), and Anne-Marie (who married visual artist ).

In 1919 Subes replaced Émile Robert as artistic director of Borderel & Robert, and rose to chief executive after Robert's death in 1924. He also took a professorship at the École Boulle.

In 1924, he purchased the Château de Larnagol in southern France, which he kept as a holiday home for the rest of his life. By the 1950s, he also had a weekend home near Orléans.

In the 1960s, Raymond Subes moved the production facilities of Borderel & Robert from their Parisian location at rue Damrémont to Saint-Denis. He was buried in his family's tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery where he joined his parents, stepparents and wife.

Work

Subes left most of his creations unsigned, but became highly recognized for his unique and elegant design style, often inspired by calligraphy. He worked primarily with wrought iron but also bronze, copper, and starting in the 1930s also aluminum, weathering steel and galvanized steel. Industrialist Marcel Bloch, founder of Dassault Aviation, purchased the door and had it cut into two unequal pieces: the larger one now adorns Dassault Aviation's head office in Saint-Cloud, on the site where Bloch established a propeller plant in 1938, and the smaller piece is at the Dassault plant in Mérignac, Gironde.

Subes made designs for a wide variety of commissions: luxury ocean liners, such as the SS Île de France (1926), SS L'Atlantique (1931), SS Normandie (1935), SS Liberté (1950), and SS France (1962) churches including and Arras Cathedral (1920s), Sacré-Cœur in Paris (early 1920s), (1926), in Élisabethville (1927–1928), (1930), Casablanca Cathedral (1930), Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1948), the Institut d'Art et d'Archéologie (ca. 1930), the Palais de la Porte Dorée (1931), government buildings, such as the (1931), the , or the

Subes received many official commissions from the French state and prominent French public institutions. He worked with the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, including on the service donated by the French Republic for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth of England in 1947. In 1953, he redesigned the grand collar of the Legion of Honour. In 1955, he went on to design the medals for the newly revamped Ordre des Palmes académiques, and in 1957, for the newly established Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Subes's design for the latter has been referred to as the "most beautiful jewel" among French honorific orders. Subes also designed forty ceremonial swords for members of the Institut de France throughout the years; a retrospective exhibition of these was held in May–June 1972 at the Monnaie de Paris.

Subes remained active until his death. In 1962, In 1968, he won the design for the memorial to Marshal Leclerc at the Porte d'Orléans in Paris, which was however criticized for outdated design. Subes's outsized torches that framed the monument were demolished in the 1990s, while Leclerc's statue by was repurposed in the memorial as reconstructed in 1997 on a design by architect .

Awards and honors

In addition to his military honors from World War I, Raymond Subes was granted the Legion of Honour as knight (1926), officer (1938), and commander (decree of ).

In 1958, Subes was the first decorative artist ever elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

In August 2010, a square bearing Raymond Subes's name was inaugurated in Larnagol, where he had owned and refurbished the local castle.