ArtistFrench
Pierre Paulin
1 active items
Pierre Paulin was born in Paris on 9 July 1927. After failing his baccalaureate, he trained as a ceramicist in Vallauris on the French Riviera and later as a stone carver in Burgundy - a path toward sculpture that ended when he injured his right arm. He subsequently enrolled at the Ecole Camondo in Paris, the private design school then known as the Centre d'Art et de Techniques, graduating in 1950. A family background shaped by his uncle Georges Paulin, a covert automobile designer who died in the French Resistance in 1941, gave Pierre a particular sense of purpose in his work.
His early career passed through the Gascoin company in Le Havre, where exposure to Scandinavian and Japanese design redirected his thinking about material and form. The decisive turn came when he began working with the Dutch manufacturer Artifort in 1958. Over the following decade Paulin produced the series of chairs that defined his reputation: the Mushroom (1960), the Tulip (1965), the Ribbon (1966), and the Tongue (1967-68). Each used a steel tube frame packed with moulded foam, then wrapped in a single piece of stretch jersey. The method allowed fully organic, body-conforming shapes that had no precedent in postwar production furniture.
The hedonistic quality of those forms attracted the attention of the French state. In 1972, President Georges Pompidou commissioned Paulin to redesign three rooms in the semi-private sections of the Elysee Palace, including the dining room and smoking room. In 1984 Paulin returned to the Elysee for Francois Mitterrand, designing the presidential office that was installed in 1988 during Mitterrand's second term. He also undertook the redesign of the Denon Wing of the Louvre and the hall of tapestries in Paris City Hall.
Paulin received a Gold Medal from the Societe d'Encouragement a l'Art et a l'Industrie in 1959, the Rene Gabriel Prize at the 12th Milan Triennial in 1960, a Design Award from Monza in 1968, and an award at Eurodomus in 1970. He retired to the Cevennes in southern France in 1994 but continued designing. A major retrospective was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2016. On his death in June 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as the man who made design an art.
On the Auctionist platform, Paulin's work appears across 14 lots, concentrated at Stockholms Auktionsverk. Items span his most enduring Artifort models: Tulip chairs, Mushroom armchairs, Oyster ottomans, and the Groovy chair, as well as later pieces for Ligne Roset and La Cividina. Realized prices for pairs of Tulip chairs have reached 4,200-6,876 SEK. Demand is steady among collectors of postwar Scandinavian-adjacent design, and his pieces circulate regularly through the Nordic secondary market.