Louise Dorothee (née Dyte, called Dollie) and Pierre Chareau

Louise Dorothee Dyte, known as “Dollie,” was a teacher and translator raised in a prominent Jewish family in London. In 1904 she married Pierre Chareau, one of the foremost French designers and architects of the early twentieth century. The couple’s personal and professional life was intertwined in a network of artists, clients, and collaborators. Together, the Chareaus assembled a notable collection of works by Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipschitz, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso.

Pierre took courses at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, though he did not receive a formal degree. An ensemblier (interior designer) by training, Pierre’s practices as an architect and designer were intimately related as he pursued harmonious interiors through rigorous craftsmanship and a shrewd attention to materials. His role designing interiors for ocean liners and hotels as a master draftsman for the prestigious British firm Waring and Gillow had a formative impact upon his use of mobile parts to create transitional spaces. After four years of military service during the First World War, Pierre opened his atelier in Paris in 1919 and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne later the same year. He quickly gained renown for his elegant, understated designs and original combinations of industrial and luxury materials, and was accepted as a member of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs in 1923. He exhibited at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (1925), and became a founding member of International Congresses for Modern Architecture (CIAM) in 1928.

During the 1920s, Dollie played an integral role in her husband’s professional life. She maintained Pierre’s business correspondence at his atelier at 54 rue Nollet and managed the operations of a separate retail space, La Boutique, opened in 1924 at 3 rue du Cherche-Midi, where Pierre sold lighting, textiles, and wallpaper and also mounted exhibitions of modern paintings; a year later, the Chareaus rented space at La Boutique to the emerging gallerist and publisher Jeanne Bucher. Dollie was also a designer and artist in her own right: she designed furnishings that were sold at the showroom, and in 1939, exhibited her artwork at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher-Myrbor.

Dollie introduced Pierre to his most important early patrons, real-estate scions and brothers Emile and Edmond Bernheim, who facilitated additional commissions among their friends and family in Paris and Alsace-Lorraine circles. In 1923 Edmond’s daughter Annie (whom Dollie had tutored as a young girl) and her new husband Dr. Jean Dalsace commissioned Pierre to design the interior of their apartment on the boulevard Saint Germain and later to construct the Maison de Verre (1928−32). The home—an embodiment of Pierre’s modernist vision of fluid, transitional space achieved through the use of movable parts—was the first domestic construction to employ glass blocks as a primary building material, and has been compared to a Cubist assemblage in its transposition of volumes and layered textures, surfaces, and colors.

The Chareaus were members of L’Oeil Clair, an association of art patrons within the French Communist Party who purchased works and rotated them throughout members’ homes. Other members included the Dalsaces, Bucher, and Jean Lurçat. At times the Chareaus borrowed friends’ works, including paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Marc Chagall, to display in exhibitions showing Pierre’s interior designs. During the 1920s, Pierre also collaborated with architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to create film set designs for director Marcel L’Herbier, incorporating works on loan from Robert Delaunay, René Lalique, Léger, and Lurçat, as well as furniture and art from his personal collection in such films as L’Inhumaine (1924), Le Vertige (1926), and L’Argent (1928). The Chareaus were subsequently involved in the Coopérative International du Film Indépendant and hosted a screening of German experimental filmmaker Walter Ruttman’s Weekend at their home in 1930.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Chareaus assembled an important collection of modern art which included works by Braque, Klee, Léger, Lipschitz, Mondrian, and Picasso. It was thoughtfully displayed throughout the apartment at 54 rue Nollet, often shown in distinctive frames or in dialogue with furnishings. Their collection contained Cubist paintings and papiers collés by Braque, Roger de la Fresnaye, Juan Gris, and Picasso, including Picasso’s Guitar (1912; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Glass and Bottle of Bass (1914; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), and Georges Braque’s Homage to J.S. Bach (1911–12; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). They also collected Constructivist and Neoplasticist work, and were among the first collectors of Mondrian’s work in France. Several Dada and Surrealist paintings by Max Ernst, André Masson, and Joan Miró were included in the collection. The Chareaus also owned a caryatid by Amedeo Modigliani (placed in their garden), several sculptures by Lipchitz, and a remarkable relief by Lipchitz titled Still Life (1918; Centre Pompidou, Paris) that closely resembled a work owned by the Dalsaces.

Forced to leave Paris during the Second World War, and unable to find employment in New York, the Chareaus had to part with several works, including Ernst’s Interior of the View (1922; private collection) and several drawings by Lipchitz. Bucher intervened on behalf of the Chareaus to recover Modigliani’s Caryatid (1914; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) when they had difficulty securing its return after loaning the work to the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Despite their financial straits, the Chareaus continued to expand their collection, and purchased work by Nicolas de Staël and Robert Motherwell. In 1947, Pierre built a studio and house for Motherwell on the latter’s compound in East Hampton. He employed innovative techniques to construct the house from prefabricated, military-issue Quonset hut and concrete blocks; the home was featured in a June 1948 story in Harper’s Bazaar. The Chareaus never returned to Paris, and Dollie remained in New York until her death. The few works that they did not sell in France in the late 1930s were later sold to The Museum of Modern Art, New York.