The Gras lamp has an exceptional place in the history of the lamp. Designed and manufactured in 1921, it pioneered a new system of lighting whose vocation was to meet the demands of both the world of industry and the rapidly developing service sector.
Easily adaptable to each user's needs, the Gras lamp efficiently lit machine tools, drawing boards, offices, laboratories, and even the operating room of the ocean liner île-de-France. Eschewing ornamental mannerism, its creator, the engineer Bernard-Albin Gras, endowed it with an aesthetic that was the product of the perfect harmony of purpose and design, the basis for what is now known as "design."
As such, the lamp's success was immediate, so much so that it inspired imitations, notably by members of the Bauhaus school fascinated by this incunabulum of modernity. But it was Le Corbusier who imparted it with a distinctive aura, seeing in it, in accordance with his own terms, an "object-tool" reduced to its pure function and a "type objet" that he used both in his office and architectural works. Following suit, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Eileen Gray, Michel Roux-Spitz, Sonia Delaunay, Georges Braque, and many other avant-garde figures adopted the lamp, helping it go down in legend. This prestigious career went hand in hand with a more anonymous success in the workaday world, which was exceptional both in terms of the volume of orders and its longevity. There are practically no other examples of lamps that were continuously manufactured without any major modifications for over half a century.
After a few decades of obscurity, the Gras lamp found favor with a new generation of architects, interior decorators, and collectors fascinated by the object, a product of early modernism in the same way as the furniture of Le Corbusier, Herbst, Prouvé, and Perriand. This book recounts the history of an invention and an industrial adventure, and is also meant to be an exploration of the aesthetic choices of the interwar period and the more eclectic ones of the present.
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