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Primary colors

Colors

25 February 2021


Miró, Mondrian, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier… A common point? Their innovative use of colors and lines. Starting with the three fundamental – or « pure » – colors (yellow, blue and red) and the desire to reveal both the useful and the beautiful, these geniuses of trichromy upset aesthetic codes and blurred the boundaries between disciplines as early as the 20th century.

 

Today, their work resonates in the work of the new generation of stylists, architects and designers. Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Hermès, Muller Van Severen, Daria Zinovatnaya, Pani Jurek? Both iconic brands and the avant-garde of creation share the same philosophy: to claim a modern, uncluttered and, above all, functional art.

 

  • Movement

    MODERNISM

  • Prescriptor

    MONDRIAN

  • School

    PRIMARY

  • Number

    THREE

Marcelle chair – Goodmoods Editions

The Hague City Hall, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the De Stijl movement.

Gerrit Rietveld, red and blue Chair

104 years ago, Dutch artists Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg established their creative dominance with the De Stijl artistic movement, which will never leave creation, fashion, art, architecture or design. Exclusively dictated by straight lines and ‘pure’ colors, the neoplasticist aesthetic is rigorous and academic.

Storage cabinet by Jo Uiterwaal

Decoration Mad Men photo series Eric Laignel

Public Atelier and FUUZE together transformed a baroque presbytery into a primary school in the Czech Republic

Muller Van Severen

Benetton x Castelbajac FW19

Despite the rigidity of the movement, the play of colors and lines show playful and candid compositions that resonate with the rustle of the playground, or carry on the benches of the former presbytery transformed into a primary school at Vřesovice.

Moodboard bottles  » La consigne  » – Goodmoods Éditions

Bottle « La consigne » – Goodmoods Éditions

Bottle « La consigne » – Goodmoods Éditions

Inspired by this modernist era, our La Consigne bottle collection takes its panache from the optimistic precepts established by these masters of color. A double offbeat tribute, both to the current, and to the traditional consignments retwisted with brilliant colors.

La cité radieuse, Le Corbusier

The House of Brazil by Charlotte Perriand

If the prescribers are Mondrian and Van Doesburg, followed by the Bauhaus school in the 1920s, two French names stand out in this utopian quest for color: Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier (founders of the Union des artistes modernes). Regularly commissioned to make spaces functional and adapted to modern life, they used primary polychromy to compartmentalize and brighten up.

Storage cabinet (1958) installed in the Brazil Pavilion

Goodmoods Studio – 35 Rue de Chartres, 92200

International University City: pavilion of Brazil

Muller van severen

Nova Objecta

The decade was also marked by the advent of tubular design, which is still being reinvented by new designers. Begun by Marcel Breuer in the 1930s as part of his research at the Bauhaus, the tubular steel revolution continues to gain ground, true to the colorful and primary language of the German school.

Marcelle chair – Goodmoods Éditions

Smile Moon

Elise McMahon x Urban Outfitters

Spring-Summer Collection 2020 « Color Wave » at the Benetton fashion show

Spring-Summer 2020 « Color Wave » – Benetton

On the fashion side, it is Benetton that announces the color. To breathe new life into the house, Luciano Benetton and his new artistic director Jean-Charles de Castelbajac – nicknamed the « rainbow machines » – distil their industrial DNA on the Milanese catwalks, without half measures, with primary colors that stand out.

Benetton

Bruno Rey, Rey-Chair, 1971

Spring-Summer 2020 « Color Wave » – Benetton

The same goes for Hermès, whose artistic director Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski was inspired by the modernist codes of the 80s and the universe of Jean-Charles de Castelbajac to create her autumn-winter 2020 collection.

« What is beautiful must be useful. Why should it be useful? Well – it’s a bit like Bauhaus – the process of stripping away the superficial to achieve the functional. Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski.

 

Bottles  » La consigne  » – Goodmoods Éditions

Hermès Fall 2020

Prada – Fall-Winter 2021

A colorful approach that is repeated at Prada. For the Autumn-Winter 2021 men’s collection, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have co-designed an experimental show based on tactility, with a technicolor language as the spatial delimitation.

Prada – Fall-Winter 2021

« We decided to create an abstract space, blurring the notions of inside and outside and expressing the human need to touch and feel. » Miuccia Prada.

Casablanca Fall 2021

Louis Vuitton Fall 2021

Daria Zinovatnaya

Pani Jurek

Daria Zinovatnaya

The striking legacy of modernism is more than ever celebrated by young designers, especially those from the East influenced by the Russian Suprematism. Both the Ukrainian Daria Zinovatnaya and the Polish Pani Jurek fragment spaces like nobody else, transforming color into a vector for energizing spaces.

Raw Color

The libraries play with primary colors, abstraction, horizontality and balance, and are inspired by the radical and geometric art of Miró, Mondrian, or Charlotte Perriand to become real living canvases, bringing art into homes.

Muller van severen

Ico & Luisa Parisi

« Match » collection by Muller Van Severen – Reform

An aesthetic also adopted in the modern kitchens of designers Dries Otten, Hybschmann or Muller Van Severen who democratize a new way of delimiting spaces through chromatic experimentation.

Golden Lane

Workshop Toekomst

Bottle « La consigne » – Goodmoods Éditions

Bottle « La consigne » – Goodmoods Éditions

DA/DA x Monoprix

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