he made his products for young, adventurous people. It was extraordinary to discover all this.” He thought that this approach was what was needed to develop a new kind of design in a decimated Europe. “It took until the 1960s for us to get materials and it was very difficult for manufacturers,” he says. “It was important to do simply shaped objects that could be elegant, but simple in the way they were fabricated.”

From the late 1950s to the 1970s, Paulin designed more than a dozen highly distinctive sculptural chairs for Artifort. Offered in bright colors, they embodied the era’s pop aesthetic, with their biomorphic, streamlined shapes that easily invited personification. Initially named with numbers, they gained descriptives, such as Globe (1959), Mushroom and Orange Slice (1960), the iconic Ribbon (1966) and Le Chat and Tongue (1967).

Apart from designing these powerful, sinuous forms, Paulin developed a fabrication process to support his aesthetic vision. Drawing on the pioneering work of Saarinen and Eames, he moved away from Artifort’s wood frames to tubular steel and abandoned spring cushions for plywood or mesh shells shaped with foam rubber. In addition, the tailored look of traditional upholstery didn’t match his curvy shapes, which called out for a new fluid skin. Paulin’s major innovation, and one that would have a profound impact on the look of furniture for years to come, was a new upholstery method.

By the late 1950s, synthetic stretch fabric was being used increasingly for clothing, especially bathing suits. Inspired by its molded “poured in” look, Paulin got the idea of “dressing” his furniture in stretch fabric to enhance its flowing forms. As an experiment, he cut up some of his wife’s bathing suits and fitted the fabric over miniature models of what would become his Mushroom and Globe chairs, introduced in 1960. “He came and showed them to Mr. Wagemans,” says Monique Beaumont, the current director of marketing, who joined the company in 1970 as Wageman’s secretary and married his son, Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132