Jean Gillon

Jean Gillon was a Romanian-born, naturalised Brazilian architect and designer whose furniture became one of the defining expressions of Brazilian modernism, despite his arriving in the movement from an unusually circuitous route. Born in Iași, Romania, in 1919, he trained in fine arts before a decade spent moving through Europe — Paris, where he worked as a cartoonist for Le Monde and a set designer for the Paris Opera Ballet; Vienna, where he studied architecture; London, where he lectured and met his wife, Edith.

The couple settled in São Paulo in 1956, drawn by Brazil's architecture scene and the work of figures like Lina Bo Bardi. Gillon's early Brazilian work was architectural, but by the early 1960s he had turned to furniture, founding a workshop — first known as Fábrica de Móveis Cidam — that grew into Italma WoodArt, the company under which almost all of his furniture was produced. Working in Brazilian jacaranda combined with leather strapping, Gillon brought a European, sculptural sensibility to distinctly Brazilian materials and construction methods, most visibly in his best-known design, the Jangada chair — named for the traditional Brazilian fishing boats it references in form, its jacaranda frame supporting a tensioned network of leather straps across seat and back.

By the mid-1960s his output — lounge chairs, sofas, sideboards, smaller objects in rosewood — was reportedly being exported to more than twenty countries, a scale that placed Italma WoodArt among the more commercially significant of Brazil's mid-century furniture houses.