Mallet-Stevens al Pompidou Celebrating a stylish Modern architect
By Mary Blume International Herald Tribune
PARIS There were greater architects, most particularly Le Corbusier, but none were honored in their lifetimes by becoming a Paris street, even if it is only 77 meters long and 7 meters wide: the rue Mallet-Stevens in Auteuil, where the five town houses that he built still stand. Rob Mallet-Stevens was the most fashionable architect of the 1920s and early '30s, a sleek lover of fine tailors and beautiful women; his eau de cologne was Jicky by Guerlain and he used a monogrammed cigarette holder in black lacquer for his Lucky Strikes. An exhibition devoted to his career at the Centre Pompidou (until Aug. 29) shows that Mallet-Stevens was these agreeable things and a great deal more: the man who brought the Modern style into the French home, unifying structure and décor and, harder still, unifying actual builders and designers into the Union des Artistes Modernes, which he founded in 1929. He is less known than he should be because his career, cut short by two world wars and an early death in 1945, was brief, because few of his projects were actually built and because a large proportion of those that were realized were for international salons and fairs, razed when the event was over. Further, he ordered that after his death his archive be destroyed, which left the show's curator, Olivier Cinqualbre, almost empty-handed.
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