Jean-Michel Frank
810 FIFTH AVENUE
“I believe that a less severe principle can be found—the mixing of styles, The noble frames that came to us from the past can receive today's creations. The house that we build now can welcome ancient things of beauty.” - Jean-Michel Frank
In the late 1930’s Nelson Rockefeller commissioned the most avant-garde designer of the period, Jean-Michel Frank, to decorate a floor of his newly renovated triplex at 810 Fifth Avenue. “Love”, “Passion” and “Ecstasy” were words Rockefeller used when he talked of what Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr., a great friend and the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, called “an insatiable appetite for art”. He was both an activist, who commissioned major works from some of the greatest artists of his generation, and a globalist, who embraced everything from the work of 20th-century Dadaists and Surrealists, to the sculpture of Africa and 18th-century European porcelain. Rockefeller wanted his interiors to echo the classical style of Louis XV, whilst representing his interest in modern art and design. Of course, it was not a commission in the traditional sense, it was a true collaboration and partnership, and starting in 1938, Rockefeller and Frank worked together for two years curating art and appointing some of the biggest names in design. Frank was Paris based and correspondence could prove challenging. So as to better envisage the project, Frank built detailed vignettes in his studio, mirroring the size and scale of the apartment, and changing details constantly.
Image of Rockefeller's salon designed by Jean-Michel Frank, showing the Léger mural and Giacometti andirons. Source: New York Times, Ezra Stoller/Esto/Courtesy of Rockefeller Foundation.
For much of his career Frank was known as the maître of understatement, opting for a neutral color palette, allowing volume and form to dictate the spaces he created. Man-Ray’s black and white images of the parchment-clad salon he designed in 1926 for Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles's hôtel particulier became shorthand for le style Frank (though few people realize Man-Ray photographed the Noailles’ salon before art had been hung). Over time however, color slowly started to become part of his mature aesthetic, a shift partially attributable to his collaboration with designer, painter and set designer, Christian “Bébé” Bérard. For the salon of Rockefeller’s apartment, Frank commissioned Bérard to design a carpet that could stand up to his bold interiors. Bérard, who had worked as a fashion illustrator for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, painted an expressionist gouache of abstract flowers on a soft pink background. Upon reviewing options sent to him by Frank, Rockefeller replied in a letter dated January 1939 that he “liked very much the sketches for the carpets.” Frank wrote back “The two carpet drawings you selected have been put into exact scale by an artist who works for me under Bérard’s and my supervision and I presume I shall go in a month or so to Aubusson to see how they are progressing.” In April 1939, the carpets were shipped on the S.S. Normandie ocean liner.
Side view of Rockefeller's salon. Source: Architectural Digest “Jean-Michel Frank, The prolific genius of Modernist French design”
Alberto Giacometti console, commissioned directly from the artist by Jean-Michel Frank for the Rockefeller apartment in 1939. Source: Sotheby’s
Frank’s aesthetic vision is characterized by the equal importance he placed on form and texture, and through his collaborations with Alberto Giacometti, plaster became an important part of his design repertoire. For the 810 Fifth Avenue apartment, Frank commissioned from Giacometti a pair of sculptural console tables, exquisitely executed in plaster over a wood frame and finished in gold leaf. Originally intended for the dining room, the tables were later positioned in both the foyer and salon. On July 7, 1939, Frank expressed in a letter to Rockefeller, “I do hope you will be pleased with the consoles as I really think that they correspond to your desire. They permit to my taste anything you might want to put in the nich [sic] and on the table: Chinese art or modern or French or English XVIII Century.” A true expression of Frank and Rockefeller’s combined vision, these unique masterworks manage perfectly to bridge antiquity and the contemporary art of the period.
Giacometti also created two identical pairs of gilt bronze andirons, each comprised of three stacked lozenges, designed to be presented in concert with the ten-foot-tall monumental murals executed by Henri Matisse, “Le Chant” (1938), and Fernand Léger, untitled (1939), to frame the fireplaces in the salon.
The result was one of the most spectacular timeless interiors ever created. Indeed in 1939 Frank cabled Mary and Nelson Rockefeller, proudly reporting Elsa Schiaparelli's approval of their spectacular color-soaked salon.
Despite his success, Frank was plagued by drug addiction, depression, homophobic taunts and persecution by an anti-Semitic government. In 1939 Frank fled France for Argentina, taking a position as Artistic Director of furniture and decorating firm Comte. In 1941, at the age of 46, in despair over his condition as an émigré Jewish artist, Frank threw himself from the upper floors of a Manhattan apartment building and ended his life. “He was profoundly fragile yet extraordinarily prolific,” says Pierre-Emmanuel Martin-Vivier, author of Jean-Michel Frank: L'étrange luxe du rien (The Strange Luxury of Nothingness) . “He had enormous energy and accomplished so much, in spite of these terrible forces against him.”