Pair of Modernist Brass and Wrought Iron Andirons, French Work, circa 1970

These andirons announce their modernist credentials through a studied economy of form. The brass uprights — the ornamental element that, in historicist pieces, carried animal figures, heraldic devices, or decorative scrollwork — here are reduced to clean geometric volumes: profiles that resolve into angles, planes, and masses without recourse to naturalistic reference. This is ornament abolished in favour of structure, the decorative programme stripped to what cannot be removed without the object ceasing to be itself. The wrought iron bars extend behind with the same directness, functional and precise. At 13.5 centimetres tall and 37 centimetres in bar length, the proportions are compact and assured.

The modernist object in French decorative arts of the 1960s and early 1970s occupies a distinct position in the history of design: more intimate than industrial design, more considered than anonymous craft, it reflects the sustained influence of abstract sculpture and constructivist thought on the makers of domestic objects. Designers working in metal at this moment understood that the fireplace accessory — a category with deep roots in the tradition of the applied arts — could be the site of a genuine formal experiment, and that a pair of andirons with the right geometry could hold their own beside a Brancusi-influenced sculpture or a mid-century abstract canvas.

The combination of brass and wrought iron in a single object is more than a practical decision. Brass, cast and polished, is the material of refinement: soft, warm, associated with the decorative arts of the interior. Wrought iron, forged and darkened, carries the opposite association: strength, utility, the exterior world of the forge and the smithy. Their juxtaposition in a fireplace accessory enacts a small drama of materials — the civilising and the elemental held in deliberate balance — that has been central to the aesthetics of French metalwork since the seventeenth century.

In good condition with a warm patinated finish on both elements. These andirons would be equally at home in a modernist interior, a contemporary space that admits a note of crafted domesticity, or beside a fireplace framed by clean architectural lines. Height of upright: 13.5 cm. Bar length: 37 cm. Depth: 30 cm.