The Enduring Power of Andrée Putnam's Pluralism

I’m so excited to be able to spend a little time this week exploring the work of Andree Putman, who is one of my all-time favorite interior designers. Putman has described her own work as “efficient elegance” and she defines modernity as not about denying the past, but about seeing it again differently, and this project stands as a really interesting example of her unique aesthetic and approach, as well as the subjects of pluralism and minimalism that we discussed this week.

The CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux is itself an example of adaptive reuse from the southwest of France. The building was originall the Laine Warehouse, an industrial building from the early 19th century that was used to store colonial goods including sugar, coffee, cocoa, and spices. When the building was converted to a modern art museum, Andrée Putman was hired to design the entire interior, including bespoke furniture pieces, and she did so gradually, between 1983 and 1990.

Putman spend her summers at Fontenay Abbey, her family home in Burgundy, which was originally built in th 12th century for the Cistercian (sisTERshun) monastic order. The simultaneously luxurious and plain worn stone surfaces and dramatic lighting undoubtedly had a big impact on Putman’s aesthetic, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she recognized some of the same elements in the the sort of italianate medieval CAPC building, which was carefully renovated by Denis Valode and Jean Pistre in the early 80s and opened to the public in 1984.

The interiors Putman created are incredibly controlled - she worked within a very limited palette of tans and golds and tawny browns, with black and oiled bronze or steel accents, that complemented the sandy stone walls, rather than try to compete or outshine them. This is similar to the way she used a consistent color scheme to tie together the ornate 18th century details with the Art Deco and modern furniture of the Minister of Culture’s office. And at CAPC, instead of diversifying the color palette, she reaches for a very broad range of textures to create a really dynamic space that feels alive but in a muted way that’s still deferential to the contemporary art on display. 

In that pluralistic sense, she’s working with both natural and industrial materials, which call back to the history of the building and the building material itself, but she’s doing so in a really inventive, almost subversive way - the sort of peasant rural chairs in the lower right that belie the grandness of the space, and the lighting in the top right that reinvents the medieval torchiere in industrial, modern black metal. And it’s minimalist in a really sophisticated and unique way, in that it feels at once austere and empty, but also warm and inviting.