Serge Mouille Éditions

Before creating his famous lighting fixtures, Serge Mouille (1922-1988) was a precocious and gifted child who entered the School of Applied Arts in Paris at just 13 years old. There he learned to work metal with a hammer under the guidance of his master Gabriel Lacroix and immediately began a career as a goldsmith with Hénin et Cie. After the war, he combined the professions of teacher of Applied Arts and independent craftsman for various Parisian goldsmith houses.

Serge Mouille's career as a designer was born in 1951 from his meeting with Jacques Adnet (whose Danish manufacturer Gubi now reissues several works), then director of the Compagnie des Arts Français, who asked him to create a "large lighting fixture" for its customers in South America. Serge Mouille then imagined the now famous three-armed floor lamp and straight floor lamp, which inaugurated the Formes Noires series to which he owes his worldwide reputation today.

Critical recognition and commercial success came in 1956, thanks to Steph Simon's gallery, boulevard Saint Germain, which exhibited Serge Mouille's lighting alongside works by Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Isamu Noguchi and a few other key figures of the movement. functional integration for interior design.

Eager to exploit the new formal possibilities offered by neon, which had just appeared, Serge Mouille created the series of Luminous Columns in 1962, which provoked incomprehension and sold poorly. Disappointed, he stopped his lighting production in 1963 and devoted himself entirely to teaching.