Modernist Single-Panel Glass and Brass Fireplace Screen, French circa 1970

This fireplace screen exemplifies the reductive modernist aesthetic that informed the best French design of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A single clear glass panel — unframed at the sides and bottom, allowing the full transparency of the material to assert itself — is surmounted by a slender horizontal brass handle bar and supported at the base by two small brass bracket feet. The result is a screen of extraordinary visual lightness, one that allows the fireplace surround, the grate, and the fire itself to remain fully visible while providing the protective function the screen is designed to serve.

The decision to use a single unframed glass panel rather than the multi-panel folding screens or wire mesh formats more common in earlier decades represents a distinctly modernist ambition: to make the object as transparent, as unobtrusive, and as formally resolved as possible. The brass elements — reduced to the minimum necessary, a handle and two feet — are chosen for their warmth and their capacity to provide a quiet material counterpoint to the cool clarity of the glass without compromising the overall sense of lightness.

At seventy and a half centimetres wide and fifty-seven centimetres tall, this screen is well proportioned for a standard French fireplace opening of the mid-twentieth century. The seventeen and a half centimetre depth of the feet gives the panel excellent stability on the hearth floor. The design sits comfortably within the tradition established by glass-and-brass screens produced by ateliers associated with the Compagnie des Arts Français and their contemporaries.

A discreet and quietly elegant piece suited to any interior where transparency and material restraint are valued. It is in excellent condition, the glass clear and undamaged, the brass fittings clean and even in colour throughout.