Throughout her career Laverrière’s forms were driven by a sense of role-playing and world-making, full of narrative and innuendo, by turns playful and polemical, modern and anti-modern, in and out of time.
Robert Wiesenberger
Janette Laverrière 1909–2011
Born in Switzerland, designer and artist Janette Laverièrre is revered for her complex blend of Art Deco and Modernist styles, and for her seamless movement between the spheres of art and design. Laverièrre trained at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel as well as with her father, who was an architect. She created designs in tandem with her first husband, Maurice Pré, from the late 1920s until 1945, which was also the year that Laverrière officially joined the Communist Party. She made her first mirror in 1936, and would maintain a fascination with the object throughout her life, creating singular sculpture works around the reflective surfaces.
Laverièrre's ethos as a designer was “design for all,” but she was unable to enlist conventional manufacturers to produce her works – so the majority of her creations are extremely rare. Later in her career, Laverièrre would famously renounce “useful objects." As she declared, “I was thinking I am not going to do anything useful anymore, I do not want to, I cannot, so I will do useless things. All of a sudden a new world opened up for me.”
The 2000s witnessed a renewed interest in Laverrière and her world; her works have been featured at institutions including the Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2010 and the Walker Art Center in 2016. In 2019, Marian Goodman exhibited Laverièrre’s works in the exhibition Work Desk for an Ambassador’s Wife, which celebrated Laverièrre friendship and creative collaboration with Nairy Baghramian.
