Maria Pergay – Mistress of Silver
French designer Maria Pergay has left an indelible mark on the history of design. Her work remains a symbol of excellence. With ideas that are always ahead of their time, Maria was quite simply a visionary.
A pioneer of stainless-steel objects and furniture, Pergay said that she favours steel for its strength and availability, among other qualities. Pergay made her name in the 1960’s when she was approached by Uginox, a French stainless-steel company, to design small decorative objects.
When Pergay began her career in post-war France, modernism in Europe was energetically accelerating. Young architects were developing an approach to interiors and furniture meant to accommodate the pressing requirements of urbanization. In the midst of this moment, when classical decoration was being relegated to the past, Pergay’s early designs came to life. Architectural Digest describe Maria Pergay as the unstoppable matron of modernism.
Born with a sensitivity to luxury, her furniture and objects fulfilled curiosities far from the norms of the time. Her career began while creating ornate metal elements for window displays in Paris’s fashionable boutiques. With her creativity piqued, she began experimenting with silver, soon producing a complete collection of distinct, contemporary pieces in the late 1950s. And her designs were embraced by fashion houses including Christian Dior and Hermes.
The vast uniqueness of the silver objects set the tone for a lifelong tendency to challenge current trends and work outside the boundaries of her contemporaries. In addition, Pergay’s silver work functioned as a catalyst for her innovative works made of stainless steel. Pergay’s usage of this material not only became her trademark but also changed the face of French decoration in the 1970’s.
All the while, furniture design remained a harshly male-dominated field which relegated design work by women to trite ‘decoration. As a mother of four without formal training particular to furniture, nor outside support, Pergay pursued her creative instincts working relatively alone. Drawing from a multitude of sources, she was provoked by antiquity, Japanese art and the innate nature of her materials — conjuring a voice so individual that many of her pieces would not receive recognition until years after they were created.
Much like Eileen Gray, whose genius was also widely neglected because of her gender, Pergay created for her own pleasure — exhibiting and selling to clients, while quietly receiving important private commissions. In this way, she maintained a diverse and lengthy career, working enthusiastically even today.
Much in the way that Pergay’s innovative work landed her outside of the French modernist movement of the 1950s and 1960s, neither does she conform to the mainstream of today’s contemporary design. When questioned, she refuses to be designated solely as an artist, designer or decorator, but describes herself as a servant to her own creative impulses, particularly as a “captor of ideas.” Moreover, she defies the demand to produce using one theme over a singular period of time, rather creating as her ideas come, without schedule or structure.
Despite the absence of a calculated artistic agenda, retrospect makes clear the consistent core vision maintained by Pergay throughout her career. She worked in broad strokes, concentrating on the physicality of ideas rather than the details.
Having pioneered the use of stainless steel in furniture, she ceaselessly challenged the inherent limitations of her primary material. She introduced and revisited materials and motifs — not with a sense of repetition — but rather as manifestations of her creative vocabulary. Pergay never belonged to a distinct design movement or group of designers, an individual content indulging in the framework of her own imagination rather than the influences of her contemporaries.
Contemporary Cluster currently have several rare exquisite pieces from the Maria Pergay Collection. In her favourite medium of silver these pieces are available for viewing on our online store or in person at 67 Macleay St. Potts Point.