Menu
Luminaires de Serge Mouille® official website
Serge Mouille was born in Paris in 1922. He developed a talent for drawing at an early age. He found his models at the Jardin des Plantes, where he spent hours drawing plants and animals. On the advice of his drawing teacher, he entered the competitive entrance examination for Applied Arts, where he was accepted at the age of 13, the youngest student of his time.
His mentor Gabriel Lacroix made him a Master in the Art of shaping metal with a hammer. He joined Hénin Orfèvre Paris, where he soon established himself among experienced workers, all older than himself.
After the war, Serge Mouille went into business for himself, working for various goldsmith’s. He was a widely recognized craftsman. At the same time, he worked as a teacher at the French Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et Métiers d’Art (ENSAAMA), having succeeded Gabriel Lacroix as head of the goldsmith’s workshop. He devoted his entire life to teaching, but also to research, because Serge Mouille it is also, and above all, 44 years of research, drawings and mono-engravings.
His meeting with Jacques Adnet, director of the French Arts Company, in 1951 marked a turning point in his life. Adnet asked him to design a “large luminaire” for his South American customers. Serge set to work and created the Three-Armed Floor Lamp, gradually evolving from master craftsman to creative artist as he developed the now-famous Black Shapes series. The three-armed floor lamp and the straight floor lamp are the first models in this series.
A spearheading ofmodernity and the functional integration movement for interior design, the Steph Simon gallery is emblematic of the Left Bank’s development in the avant-garde furniture trade. As a sales agent for the French Aluminium company, Steph Simon met Jean Prouvé, who hired him in 1949 to distribute his furniture. In March 1956, he opened the Steph Simon gallery at 145 Boulevard Saint-Germain. Charlotte Perriand was in charge of the layout. For Steph Simon, the gallery had to have “a striking character” and had to present regular exhibitions. He showed exclusive designs by Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand, lighting by Serge Mouille, ceramics by Georges Jouve and Norbert Pierlot. Later, he showed pieces by Isamu Noguchi, Sori Yanagi, Tecno… The gallery closed in 1974.
In the 60s, the world was changing. For the past ten years, Serge Mouille has been combining his career as a teacher with that of a lighting designer. He decided to stand out radically from everything he’d done up to that point, creating a series of light columns using fluorescent tubes, which were new at the time. The two series are so different that you might think they were created by different artists. The result was incomprehension and mixed success.
He decided to stop producing luminaires in 1963 and devoted himself entirely to teaching until his death in December 1988.
These and other lines are taken from Pierre Emile Pralus’s book Serge Mouille, un classique français.
A book by Piere-Emile Pralus – Mont-Thou Editions (2006)
“In spite of the time, Serge remained very close to all those who knew him. But for those who only know his lights, this analysis of his life and work will give a better understanding of the man”.
Gin Mouille
