“Perriand used the whimsical expression ‘l’oeil en eventail’ (a wide-angle eye) to refer to an important aspect of her creative process,” according to Jacques Barsac, who seized upon the phrase as the title for a series of exhibitions devoted to Perriand’s photography. “It meant paying attention to every object, humble or striking, large or small, man-made or natural, and learning the lesson it had to teach.”

In the 1930s, Perriand, artist Fernand Léger, and Pierre Jeanneret enjoyed weekend expeditions to the Normandy beaches. “We would fill our backpacks with treasures: pebbles, bits of shoes, lumps of wood riddled with holes, horsehair brushes—all smoothed and ennobled by the sea,” she recalled in her 1998 autobiography. “We sorted them, admiring them, soaking them in water to give them more of a shine, and taking photographs. We called it our art brut.”

Architecture is an ebb and flow between interior and exterior—a round-trip.Charlotte Perriand

A lover of the outdoors and of extreme sports, Perriand praised “space, light, the joy of creating and living in our century.” She often looked to nature for inspiration, exhilarating in the “vast, open spaces of solitude and whiteness” of snowy mountains. “Everything is linked,” explained Perriand, “the body and the mind; mankind and the world; the earth and the sky.”