On the occasion of his birthday, Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication is pleased to honour the talent of Andrée Putman, her exceptional career, unclassifiable by the diversity of her talents, the longevity of sacred spirit, and especially this ability to thwart the passage of time that makes her an artist.

She once said, “I’ve often known the punishment of being early.”
which today, from New York to Hong Kong, is said to be an icon of taste
has long experienced the cost of not having the taste
of everyone. Love the great figures of French modernity, Eileen
Grey, Pierre Chareau, Jean-Michel Franck, Robert Mallet-Stevens, did not
always been as natural as it seems today. This Parisian
wink we wink at every corner of Paris, on the occasion of
its exhibition at the City Hall, also likes simple things, or even that no one
does not think of liking: for example, the chicken hatch that dressed a cabinet
in the elegant showroom of Ecart International open on rue de Rivoli, at the end of the
1970s.
Andrée Putman is probably, above all, a passionate amateur who hears
to share his loves, whether he is an avant-garde creator (of Samuel
Beckett to Jean-Michel Basquiat), an atmosphere, a childhood memory (his
childhood spent in a Cistercian abbey) or artists she
meeting with her husband Jacques Putman, collector, publisher (Pierre
Alechinsky, Bram van Velde, Alberto Giacometti, Niki de Saint Phalle).
share: editions of these artists will integrate the famous catalogues of
Prisunic, whose adventure she follows, and where she popularized, the first, the
cheap artist editions.
The design section of the national contemporary art collection keeps the testimony of
the extent of the great "gaps" that this personality, which puts so much
serious (or humorous) to design a coat rack for a catalogue
mail order as a moving checkerboard mirror like
«It’s up to you» (2003), designed for the Kreo gallery. This motif has become
as a result of the development of the Morgans Hotel in
New York, 1984.
Like Charlotte Perriand, Andrée Putman marks her time as
woman, as personality, as instigator of parties and friendships: Didier
Grumbach encourages him to enter the world of textiles and ready-to-wear with
Creators and Industrialists, while Michel Guy will later encourage him to launch
its own company, Ecart International, in 1978.