A tribute, through a series of images by the German photographic artist Heinz Peter Knes, to the famous designer and interior architect Andrée Putman (1925-2013), whose design of the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, transformed into a unique total work of art more than 20 years ago, constitutes one of the most ambitious and accomplished projects of her career and a milestone in the history of design.
Andrée Putman's design of the CAPC museum (1983 / 1990), an ambitious project that took more than ten years to complete, was a milestone. It is still considered today as a model of integration and is the result of a fruitful conjunction between a secular architecture (L'Entrepôt Lainé) and a context of contemporary production (the CAPC musée), thus responding to the specific needs of a cultural life project.
Taking into consideration all the spaces and activities of the CAPC musée, Andrée Putman will impose both a radical plastic writing and a real way of life in this exceptional context, developing a powerful and coherent vision, a total work of art unique in the world. Andrée Putman proposed a rich vocabulary for the CAPC museum, made up of numerous specific editions and re-editions showing her commitment to creators of various generations (Mallet-Stevens armchairs, benches and chairs; Mariano Fortuny lamp...) but also of multiple creations that she designed, which will remain unique pieces (the museum's reception desk, drawer knobs, the director's desk, writing desk chairs, screens with lecterns, Japanese suspensions, tilt tables for the library, etc.). ) The book that the CAPC is dedicating to Andrée Putman wishes to pay homage to and echo the ambition of this project as well as the visual scope that it constitutes. The book gives access to a vast catalog of forms little known to the general public.
In order to account for this richness and to go beyond the utopian vision constituted by the archival images of the 1990s, a new photographic perspective was needed that could reconcile a methodical inventory of Putman's writing with the poetry of forms. This is the challenge taken up by the German artist-photographer Heinz Peter Knes, whose images at the heart of this book give an account, more than 20 years later, of the evolution of Andrée Putman's plastic writing in the light of the mutations of this environment over time, thus operating a visual dialectic between the proposed way of life and the produced way of living.