Ref: article by Aurélie Raya, Paris Match, December 2021
Artist and photographer Peter Knapp tells us about his friend, the designer of these spaces to whom a beautiful book is dedicated.
Slavik? A distant, curious, dated name. His Wikipedia entry exists—brief, unadorned. Born Wiatscheslav Vassiliev in 1920 in Tallinn, this distinguished-looking gentleman nevertheless imagined countless places and objects that transformed our habits.
Graphic designer Peter Knapp, who created the layout for the book honoring him, smiles as he thinks of this old accomplice who passed away in 2014. He met him in the early 1950s when, having arrived from Switzerland to study at the Beaux-Arts, he stopped in his tracks before the façades of Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann. “Paris seemed so old-fashioned to me, and suddenly, crossing the city, I see these all-white windows, from clothing to beach accessories… Anyone leading such a project had to be interesting.”
It was the young Slavik. Knapp joined Galeries as chief graphic designer at 23. The two appreciated each other, collaborated, both devotees of Bauhaus—that movement born in 1919 in Germany, precursor of design, which rejected decoration and theorized the functionality of objects, primarily utilitarian. Slavik impressed him, amazed him. “If you look at his graphics, his sketches, his compositions, he is influenced by the Surrealists—Dalí, Cocteau, Bérard.”
A word dear to Knapp defines him: he was “modern.” This inexplicable term conveys obvious novelty, intelligent freshness, something simple in appearance, yet which makes everything around it look dated.
Slavik left Galeries because he was noticed for advertising work. Ten years after the war, France was recovering, youth was bursting forth. Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé were producing their creations; design was being born, timidly. The head of the Publicis agency, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, imported from America the idea of drugstores—shops where one could buy newspapers, records, and cigarettes and enjoy a bite for a few cents. He asked dear Slavik to conceive a vast space on the Champs-Élysées.
“Slavik’s genius was to convince Bleustein to elevate the offering. He chose black leather, white marble flooring, chrome.” The owner, delighted, requested “decoration” once construction was complete. Disaster. “For Slavik, it was over—women dressed in color, flowers on tables would create décor,” Knapp explains.
Bleustein did not yield, and so Knapp and Slavik set off to the flea markets to devise a treatment. They bought railway luggage racks, which they stretched across the walls, and worn suitcases. Wild success at the opening in 1958. A perfect marriage of intimacy and consumer luxury.
Laziness or a desire for caviar by the ladleful—Slavik, at nearly 40, abandoned the austere ideals of Bauhaus and shifted. “He became more decorator than designer.” Knapp and he diverged, their joint work ended, but the friendship remained. One became art director of Elle magazine, led by Hélène Lazareff, and an abstract painter, devotee of minimalism, while the other created hundreds of convivial, bourgeois, astonishing restaurants. Sometimes successful, like the drugstore at Nice airport—a marvel—sometimes less so.
His signature “slavikation”: curves, mirrors, promontories. “He played with contrasts. He pierced holes, loved women and curves, offered nothing vertical; his beer bottles were incredible,” Knapp notes.
But Slavik was neither Jean Prouvé nor even Philippe Starck. The venture never filed a single design. Impossible to reissue the 50 chairs he must have drawn. “I don’t understand why… Slavik was ambitious at first; he appreciated publications. We found one of his Jules Verne chairs at the flea market for 500 euros,” Peter Knapp still marvels.
Of his work, everything has disappeared except the brasserie L’Européen, near the Gare de Lyon, and Bistrot de Paris, on Rue de Lille.
