Scandinavia Dreaming

Pierre Raguideau was in his mid-30s when he decided to open a gallery. As a child in the historic French city of Nantes, he’d been taken to antique shops by his parents, which “probably sparked my interest in beautiful furniture”. But it was encountering pieces by the likes of Hans Wegner, Børge Mogensen and Finn Juhl as an adult in Paris that really caught his imagination. The snag was that his then-wife was also harbouring ambitions to become an art dealer. “We decided it probably wasn’t a good idea if both of us launched our own businesses, because we needed to live.”

He needn’t have fretted for her venture. Founded in 1993, Galerie Nathalie Obadia has grown into one of Paris’s foremost contemporary art galleries, representing the likes of Laure Prouvost, Fiona Rae, Mickalene Thomas and Wang Keping, a carved-wood sculpture by whom Raguideau has just added to his collection. “I was very influenced by Nathalie’s taste,” he concedes. “It took me some time to be freed from her influence and develop [a more abstract aesthetic of] my own.”

But lest her enterprise fail in its early days, he stuck with his day job, forging a successful career in the financial management of “large IT groups”, and rising to be chief financial officer of “quite an important listed company. It was interesting,” he continues. “And I had good wages. Not a fortune,” but sufficient to fund a growing collection of mid-century Scandinavian furniture. He still dreamt of the gallery he’d hoped to open and “On the day I retired, I created a company and started to buy stock and look for a store.” He settled for a showroom on Rue du Turenne in Paris’s Marais district, where Galerie Pierre Arts & Design finally opened its doors in September 2020. He was 62.

With the pandemic ongoing, “it was a difficult decision,” he admits. But the site was ideal, “close to all the important contemporary art galleries. Rather than risk letting it go, I said to myself: ‘If you wait for the sea to be calm and the sun to be shining to start, you will never set sail. You are ready to go, so let’s go.’”

In any case, the market was rising. Two months earlier, Christie’s Paris had held its first postlockdown Design sale and achieved its best-ever result in the category, realising more than €12 million (with fees) and finding buyers for 80% of lots. Confined to their homes by successive lockdowns and more mindful than ever of their surroundings, collectors were keen to buy furniture.

Admittedly, the stellar lots had been mostly French. “Scandinavian design has always been less popular in France than in northern Europe and the US,” he says. “I think because France and Italy had their own Modernist design movements. If you look at auctions, it’s obvious that the biggest prices are currently made by Pierre Jeanneret, Georges Jouve, Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand and Italian designers such as Gio Ponti.” But the comparative scarcity of Nordic design in France – his is now the only gallery in Paris to specialize in it – gives it cachet.

Raguideau tends to buy “from a network of people mainly in Scandinavia. Though there is a lot in Germany too, probably because – again, this is my own interpretation – the country was destroyed after the war, and people who had money wanted to get rid of the past and project themselves in a new age with new furniture. I think that’s the reason the German upper middle class bought a lot of Scandinavian design in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Two years on, Galerie Pierre stocks a range of distinguished mid-century furniture principally but no longer exclusively Nordic, by the likes of Gustav Bahus, Peter Hvidt & Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen, Torbjørn Afdal, Erik Kirkegaard, Ib Kofod Larsen, Kai Lyngfeldt Larsen and Arne Vodder, as well as Juhl, Mogensen and Wegner. But it has also begun to diversify, first into lighting and ceramics, now into art too, specializing in paintings and photographs by “undiscovered” Paris-based artists such as Kassia Knap, Shitomi Murakami and Benjamin Bēni, which Raguideau exhibits in room sets configured to evoke domestic settings.

“It’s what I like to do at home,” he says, referring to the way he juxtaposes furniture by Wegner with traditional Ashanti stools from Ghana and Senufo ones from Côte d’Ivoire. “Wegner created nearly all his pieces in wood, and I love the way that Senufo and Ashanti stools are also carved from a single piece of wood. Their shapes, their curves, are very modern. And there is a purity in their form that makes a connection with Modern design, I think.”

The real challenge for a collector-turned-dealer, however, lies in deciding what to sell and what to keep. “When I’m buying for the gallery, I buy exactly as I would for myself. And when the pieces arrive, the first thing I think is: ‘That would be great in my home.’ Really I would like to keep everything. Some things I have to force myself to part with.” For example, “I recently sold two very nice armchairs by Hans Wegner from my personal collection to the new Dior boutique on Avenue Montaigne. They were the ones now known as The Chair [JH-503]. But that’s just what art dealers do. Sometimes you just have to sell a piece in order to buy something else.” (Those chairs were soon replaced by another Wegner fauteuil.) But best of all is the contentment his “new life” has brought him. “Going off to work has never felt easier,” he says. “I’m so happy when I’m at the gallery.”