Paris Couleurs

In Paris in the 1950s, the geometric and colorful facades of color merchants caught the eye of the young Basel-born Gérard Ifert. At the very start of a career at the crossroads of design, graphic design and scenography, Ifert was also an avid photographer. He recorded these chromatic compositions, which he likened to works of Swiss concrete art. This astonishing collection of images reveals an anonymous street art that has now disappeared, and provides food for thought on the links between art and design, the transformations of the urban landscape and the aesthetics of everyday life. The resulting series of ektachromes is an exceptional documentation of a now-defunct form of street art, and provides an opportunity to revisit a part of the career of a designer whose work we have only recently discovered. After the “Photographismes” exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which revealed an experimental aspect of Ifert’s production, the present book reveals another facet, that of a city surveyor, attentive to the manifestations of a vernacular urban culture. Following in Ifert’s footsteps, Catherine de Smet’s text, in which Valentine and Ripolin, Picasso and Duchamp, Karl Gerstner and Richard-Paul Lohse, Sophie Taeuber and Victor Vasarely, Verena Loewensberg and Bernard Frize, among others, cross paths, returns to what the motley brilliance of these Parisian stores tells us.