Rooms & ProjectsUnder $2,500: Where Collecting Modern Design Can Start
Eight lots in the current sale with a high estimate at or below $2,500, each of them by a designer with a documented body of work.
1892–1970
French designer who went from aluminium and chrome between the wars to rattan after it, and made the second look like the more radical move.
Why they matter
Sognot trained in cabinetmaking at Jansen and in ship fitting at Krieger, joined the design studio at Au Printemps around 1920 and ran its Primavera workshop from 1931 to 1939. From 1928 he worked closely with Charlotte Alix, and much of what the two produced together cannot be assigned to one of them.
Their interwar work was hard modernism: duralumin and tubular metal, furniture for the Maharaja of Indore's palace at Manik Bagh and for the liner Normandie. After 1945 he turned almost entirely to rattan and became the reference point for it in France, making lamps, sconces, tables and case pieces from woven cane over metal armatures into the mid 1960s.
The rattan is what surfaces at auction. It is light, it takes California light well, and it dries and pales rather than failing.
Available now
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Key forms & materials
Forms
- Rattan table lamp
- Rattan pendant
- Rattan sconce
- Rattan and metal desk
- Bamboo bar
- Rattan vanity
Materials
- Rattan
- Woven cane
- Tubular metal
- Duralumin
- Wood
What to look for
Marks, editions, patina and production partners — fact-checked for this designer.
- No stamp or label convention is documented for his work, so attribution rests on provenance and on comparison with published Primavera and salon photographs.
- Much of the interwar output is a joint effort with Charlotte Alix, and attributed to Sognot and Alix is often the most accurate credit available.
- Rattan lamps in this idiom were made by many French workshops after the war and unsigned examples carry his name far more often than they should.
- Check the armature: his rattan is wound over a metal frame, and a piece with no internal structure is usually a lesser workshop's.
- Dry, pale, slightly brittle cane is normal at seventy years old; a piece that looks freshly golden has been refinished or is new.
Past Circa results
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