Compas Dans l’Oeil - designed by Andrée Putman - Manufactured by Baldinger Archictectural Lighting

Compas Dans l’Oeil
Desk Lamp designed by
Andrée Putman, French (* 1925; † 2013)
Manufactured by Baldinger Archictectural Lighting

This is a Putman designed table lamp which is called „compas dans l’oeil“- literally traslated that means „compass in the eye“ which is an archictectural term that equates the eye with a precision instrument for calculating proportion and distance. the lamp shows a grey lacquered base with a stainless steel top which can be opened and has been meant to hold a paper block inside which specially has been made for Hotels in this version. The lined and perforated nickel shade comes with an exquisite satin brass hinge, moveable nearly 180°, which provides soft directional or ambient light.
These Lamps has been designed for and manufactured by Baldinger & Sons of New York in 1988, are from the „Ritz Carlton“ where Putman was charged with creating an exceptional luxury hotel, with 174 guestrooms and occupying a circular construction, opposite Volkswagen's so called Autostadt in Wolfsburg right in the middle of Germany.

total height 58cm 22.75inch 87cm 34.25inch when shade folded up
depth of base 30cm 11.75inch base's width 12cm inch
shade 20x16cm 7.85inch x 6.25inch and 7cm 2.75inch at top
shade’s height 30cm 11.75inch

The Parisienne born Andrée Putman, rediscovered and reissued early Modernist French furniture and then became a global renowned interior designer. In Putman's career she created the shops for Cacharel, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Guerlain, Karl Lagerfeld, Thierry Mugler, Yves Saint Laurent, redesigned the interior of the Concorde, created the look of the first major boutique hotel, Morgans in New York. Many other Hotels followed like the Ritz Carlton these Lamps are from.

She designed the elegantly spare office of the French minister of culture Jack Lang, the subtly textured and dramatically lighted Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, a 31-floor apartment skyscraper in Hong Kong, appropriately called "the Putman“ and designed the set for “The Pillow Book,” by Peter Greenaway.

Andrée Putmann achieved a remarkable body of work that is both timeless and beyond fashion. She has been a master of detail at the service of simplicity, she took her elegant touch into small-scale objects, designing furniture, crystal, carpets, table- and flatware, even produced refreshing phenomenally scents. She looked and dressed elegant as her interiors, had a gravelly Gauloise voice worthy of a chanteuse and has been called the "Grand Dame of french Interior Deign“, the „ Godess of elegant simplicity“ by interior design and architecture magazines.
Her passion for forgotten 1930s French Modernist pieces led her to start a career marketing them through "Ecart International", which she founded in 1978. Through Ecart, she started as a designer herself, even though she had never formally studied design or architecture. She set up her design company, Studio Putman, in 1997. The studio's output included everything from interiors, furniture, fashion accessories and rugs.
“I love the crazies, the solitaires, Mariano Fortuny, Eileen Gray, Pierre Chareau, for example, were delicate creatures, failures condemned to a fatal solitude.My supreme reward was to realize that my work as an amateur archaeologist of my century made famous names that I once had to spell, with rage, even to art historians.”
Her most recent designs has been silverware and jewellery for Christofle, a champagne cooler for Veuve Clicquot and a reinterpretation of the Louis Vuitton steamer bag, stores for Anne Fontaine in Tokyo, Paris and New York and private residences all around the world in Dublin, Miami, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, Tel Aviv and Tangiers.

Putman spoke of “the interiority of emotion, of emptiness and of the inner scenography of space.” and “Materials are not objects, like letters in a vocabulary, they have connotations, they belong to a code, like shapes or words.”