Simone Prouvé was born in Nancy, France in 1931. The daughter of renowned metalworker and architect Jean Prouvé, she was encouraged by her mother Madeleine to learn sewing and weaving, and moved to Paris to intern with Micheline Pingusson (the wife of architect Georges-Henri Pingusson) to learn weaving techniques. In 1953 and 1954, Prouvé travelled to Sweden and then Finland to train under textile artists Astrid Lund and Dora Jung.
Back in France, based in Nancy, she collaborated with architects and worked with Steph Simon for Charlotte Perriand’s benches, and exhibited at the opening of his gallery in 1956 in Paris. In 1959, Prouvé set her studio in Paris. Later, she met and began working with André Schlosser, creating textiles and tapestries for a variety of commissions. An intuitive weaver, Prouvé sometimes worked loosely from sketches made by Schlosser during their collaboration rather than with strict adherence to a predetermined design. The two married and collaborated from 1963 to 1989.
Prouvé’s woven works range in scale and materials. Pieces commissioned to compliment architectural spaces reached up to 2,500 square feet in size. Her weavings combine natural tones such as ecru, olive green, and grey into tapestries patterned with abstracted, sinuous shapes.
As of 1991, Prouvé began introducing industrial materials such as fire-resistant yarns, glass fibres, flexible and stiff stainless steel, polyethylene, and Kevlar® into her tapestries, wall hangings, and partitions. The combination of ancient crafting technique with modern materials sets Prouvé’s ambitious works apart.
At age 90, Prouvé continues to weave in her studio in France. Her works have been exhibited since 1956 and more recent collaborations include wall hangings as well as pieces inserted in glass doors for French museums such as the Bourdelle Museum, the Matisse Museum, and the André Malraux Museum.
In 2021, Simone Prouvé’s work entered the Centre Pompidou’s contemporary art collections, and several of her research notes on weaving and dyeing are now made available to professionals by the Kandinsky Library. Most pieces are exhibited in the Simone Prouvé room, located on Level 4, home of the contemporary art collections.
