On Sunday, 15 January 2023, French television network Arte in collaboration with Paris' Galerie Ecart presents a new Andrée Putman documentary directed by Saléha Gherdane and charting the incredible legacy of the interior designer. Airing at 4.50pm CET, the documentary features extended interviews with her daughter Olivia Putman, who since 2013 has taken over the studio and continued on her mother’s work, as well as testimonials from designers Philippe Starck and Vincent Darré, design historian Anne Bony, and Martine Péan, director of Bordeaux's CAPC contemporary art museum, designed by Putman in 1983.
Andrée Putman documentary: grand dame of design
Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, Paris
Born in 1925 into a middle-class family, Putman grew up with music and art, and met her husband, art critic and collector Jacques Putman, in the 1950s. The pair developed friendships with some of the most avant-garde artists of the time, from Niki De Saint-Phalle to Bram van Velde.
The bathroom at the Morgans Hotel, New York, designed in 1984
As France’s approach to the home was changing, Putman worked at culture magazine L’Oeil, specialising in design and creating vignettes that offered an innovative point of view on decoration and combining objects in an eclectic way, before moving to department store Prisunic, where she eventually became art director of the Home Department. Through her work, she aimed to democratise design, creating modern, beautiful pieces for less.
Putman's own loft in Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Among her most iconic creations was her own apartment, which she created in 1978 in a loft within a former factory in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, conceiving a new way of approaching and dividing the space. ‘Nothing like that had been seen at the time,’ says Olivia Putman, explaining that her mother’s style was a strong contrast to the bourgeois approach that had dominated interiors up until that time. The space was decorated with an eclectic array of objects and furniture, from antiques to rare 1920s pieces, with a strictly black-and-white palette that would become Putman’s signature. ‘Not calculated, but well-considered,’ said Darré of her interior work.
Le Concorde interior revamp, 1994
Many of Putman's most iconic designs have become almost legendary: from her black-and-white bathrooms at New York's Morgans Hotel to the stacked escalators at Le Bon Marché and the staircase of Monaco's Gildo Pastor Center ('I had promised a staircase like a necklace,' she said of the design).
The hour-long documentary revisits her most important designs and creates a fitting portrait of her revolutionary approach to interiors.
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