ArtistFrench
Jacques Adnet
3 active items
Jacques Adnet was born on 20 April 1900 in Chatillon-Coligny, a small town in Burgundy, together with his twin brother Jean. The two grew up inseparable and moved together to Paris to study at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs under Charles Louis Genuys. In the early 1920s they worked as a duo at La Maitrise, the design studio of Galeries Lafayette, where they encountered the Art Deco designer Maurice Dufrene. Jean eventually stayed on to become a sales manager at the store. Jacques had a different trajectory in mind.
In 1928, at 28, Adnet took the directorship of La Compagnie des Arts Français, the decorative arts firm founded by Louis Sue and Andre Mare whose interiors had retained traces of 18th-century grandeur. Adnet dismantled that ornamental inheritance and rebuilt the house around industrial materials - chromed metal, smoked glass, sharkskin and lacquer - arranged in strict geometric silhouettes. Under his leadership until 1959, the CAF executed commissions for the Ile-de-France ocean liner's communal salon (1926) and interior schemes for the Elysee Palace private apartments, as well as the UNESCO meeting room in Paris, the kind of institutional work that defined the boundaries of French prestige design in the postwar decades.
The collaboration with Hermes in the late 1940s produced what many consider his most enduring body of work. Adnet wrapped slender steel-tube frames in hand-stitched saddle leather, using the same tan bridle hide and waxed thread that the maison applied to its equestrian goods. Chairs, desks, lamps and - most enduringly - mirrors edged in leather straps with brass fittings moved the craft logic of the saddler into domestic space. The round 'Circulaire' mirror, with its continuous leather-wrapped frame, became such a consistent reference point that GUBI has reissued the design into the contemporary market, where it appears today in tan, black and cream leather variants.
After the Compagnie closed in 1959, Adnet became director of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, a post he held until 1970, shaping an entire generation of French designers before his death on 29 October 1984.
On Auctionist, Adnet's 11 catalogued items are split primarily between mirrors (4 lots) and miscellaneous decorative objects, with furniture, tables, lamps and chairs also represented. Bukowskis accounts for the majority of appearances - Stockholm, Vastberga and Malmo combined - reflecting the appetite for French mid-century design among Scandinavian buyers. The highest recorded sale was a leather-framed Hermes mirror at 4,000 SEK, while Gubi reissue pieces such as the 'Adnet Circulaire' also appear at auction, typically at lower prices around 300 SEK, trading as contemporary production rather than vintage originals.