Maria Pergay: the innovator whose steel furniture put her at the forefront of 20th-century design

When Maria Pergay was asked why she made furniture out of steel, she responded that it was because she had a score to settle with Stalin. ‘You know his name means steel? So the more I hit it, the happier I am.’

Designers don’t come more experimental than Maria Pergay. Even among her own radical generation, she seemed more inventive than most. Small, self-assured, intense (‘My main Russian characteristic is passion. I cannot remain indifferent to anything’), this émigrée designer, on the face of it, seemed quite implausible: a young mother of four children, operating at the heart of the European avant-garde, forging a new luxury of strong light and hard surfaces out of steel.

Furthermore, her childhood reads like a Len Deighton novel. She was born in 1930 into a relatively affluent family in Moldavia (now divided between Moldova, Romania and Ukraine), where her father was an engineer in the army. On being unmasked as a spy, he fled to Russia and was later sent to the gulag. Maria and her mother escaped to relatives in France via Germany. Her recollections of this trauma were visual rather than emotional: she was mesmerised by the electric lights of Berlin, and overwhelmed by the size of Paris.

Initially interested in costume design, Pergay studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques in Paris and took classes in sculpture with the Russian artist Ossip Zadkine at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

In 1950, keen to experience real freedom after what seemed like a lifetime of war, she moved to New York, but found a country riven by paranoia. It was the era of McCarthyism, and, as she recalled, ‘people in the streets were reading the communist newspaper, Daily Worker, hidden inside another newspaper. And my neighbours, who also read it, were under police surveillance.’

Deciding that she was just ‘too French’ to assimilate in the United States, she returned to Paris, where she became a window dresser. The theatrical interiors she created soon caught the attention of a group of post-war fashion designers, among them Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy, who commissioned her to make luxury items for them.

By now she was married to the businessman Marc Pergay and had four children to support. She opened a shop on the Place des Vosges selling silver boxes inlaid with precious stones that enchanted buyers including Salvador Dalí, who commissioned her to make him a skeleton of a moth.

Her big break came in the late 1950s when the French company Uginox approached her to make gifts out of steel for their clients. It was a revelation. ‘Nothing is more beautiful,’ she said of the material. ‘It talks to me… if it is ready to obey, it is like a tamed animal, but if it is bad, it’s a slap in the face.’

She persuaded Uginox to give her free rein to make furniture, unveiling her first collection in 1968 at the Galerie Maison et Jardin. It was an instant hit, recalling an earlier modernist aesthetic of propeller-like smoothness found in the works of Eileen Gray and Marcel Breuer.

Among the highlights were a ‘Ring’ chair (chaise ‘Anneaux’) inspired by the coiling shape of orange peel, and a wavelike ‘Flying Carpet‘ daybed (lit ‘Tapis volant’), which she said came to her in a dream. The fashion designer Pierre Cardin bought everything, becoming one of her most devoted collectors. The daybed was an instant hit when the high priestess of the French New Wave, Brigitte Bardot, draped herself across it on the set of Sacha Distel’s TV show.

By the 1970s, Pergay’s furniture was all the rage. She had already designed interiors for the president of Tunisia and was now sought out by the empress of Iran, who commissioned her to make a canopy bed out of steel. Pergay had an ability to create playful abstract designs without being frivolous — aided, in part, by her choice to combine steel with softer-looking materials such as horn, lemonwood, fur and straw.

All this suggests that she should rightly have her place in the 20th-century design canon next to Eero Aarnio, Verner Panton and Charlotte Perriand. However, while the critics took notice of Pergay’s designs, her name was often left out of their articles. And with the rise of Post-Modernism, Pergay’s furniture fell out of fashion.

She carried on, energetic as ever, working for select clients such as the Saudi royal family. It was not until 2000, when the New York gallerists Suzanne Demisch and Stéphane Danant came knocking at her guesthouse in Morocco, that she enjoyed a revival, holding her first exhibition in 30 years in 2006.

In her later years, Pergay was an engaging interviewee, happy to discuss the properties of steel and surprised at the things she had made 30 or 40 years earlier being sold at auction for astonishing sums. In 2012 she was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

She died in 2023, at the age of 93, at her home in the south of France. Towards the end of her life, she was asked about her creative process. ‘There are no prototypes: the object is in my head, and because I’ve worked with the material for so long, I know what to do. It is a bit like cooking a favourite recipe,’ she said modestly.

On 3 December 2024, Christie’s in Paris will offer some 180 lots in the Design sale, from mid-century French masters Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Royère and Georges Jouve to more contemporary pieces, such as a Maria Pergay ensemble and iconic works by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. On view from 28 November to 3 December