Obres

Informació de l'obra i context de creació

"I cut my hair like a street urchin and wore a necklace I made from some cheap chrome-plated copper balls. I called it a bearing ball necklace, a symbol of my adherence to the machine age of the 20th century. 

"I was proud that my jewelry did not rival that of Queen of England. I was labeled 'inhuman' in allusion to Marcel L'Herbier's film L'inhumaine and was [the necklace] an easy target for Parisian street kids."

"To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world."

Charlotte Perriand

In 1927, when Perriand had his ball bearing necklace made and habitually wore it, she was at the beginning of his exploration of "machine age" objects. 

Her interest in all things mechanical and metallic was at its height. She had begun working in Le Corbusier's studio on Rue de Sévres and had forged friendships with many protagonists of the avant-garde movements of the time such as Pierre Jeanneret, José Luis Sert, Alfred Roth, Erns Weissmann, Kunio Maekawa, Ferdinand Leger and others. 

The collar became synonymous with Perriand and her advocacy of machine aesthetics in the late 1920s. Subsequently, the necklace attains the status of mythical object in the context of modernist aesthetics.

Along with Charlotte Perriand in France, within the Modern Movement in architecture and design, we find parallel pioneering women architects and designers of the time: Irish Eileen Gray, Margarete Schüte-Lihotzky with her extensive work in social housing and her obsession with facilitating the work of women in the house so that they have more free time; the Finnish Aino Aalto, the Danish Ragna Grubb, interested in social housing, the Chinese American Anne Tyng co-author of the most significant buildings of the office of Louis Khan in the 50s in the U.S. or Lilly Reich who promoted the Bauhaus designs between the Bauhaus and the Modern Movement in architecture and design. Lilly Reich promoted Bauhaus designs among so much productive activity she had. And we must also highlight the architects and designers who came out of the Bauhaus school as Marianne Brandt or Gunta Stötzl, among others.

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Art History

Jewelry Design

Industrial Design

Technologies

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