do when one did not go to school and is a musician who stopped playing music?", she asked her maternal grandmother, Madeleine Saint-René Taillandier. "Nothing except messenger," was the reply. Taking her grandmother's advice, Andrée started working as a messenger for Femina magazine. While taking care of all the dirty little jobs of the office, she observed with a sharp eye the social theatre which takes place during meetings. She worked for Elle and L'Oeil, a prestigious art magazine where the still-lives she imagined with objects of various styles and from different periods attracted attention. She identified what is sophisticated and innovative, widened her knowledge of designers... and walked by the Café de Flore every day. "We could see Antonin Artaud, Juliette Gréco, Giacometti, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir… People who looked free and were emancipated from conventions." These first jobs allowed Andrée to meet artists, characters more familiar to her than intellectuals. At the time, she was not confident enough to fully express herself. She therefore stayed in the background rather to put the talents of others in the limelight, something for which she showed great talent since she was raised in an artistically-rich environment. Personally knowing what it is to "be trapped into the beaten tracks", she was moved by "people whose work is not understood", "impressed by these artists who do not look for anything else but remaining in the depth of their sincerity, their risk", she only wished to help them and establish a connection between them and the rest of the world. In the late 1950s, Andrée Aynard married Jacques Putman, an art critic, collector and publisher. Together they associated with artists such as Pierre Alechinsky, Bram van Velde, Alberto Giacometti and Niki de Saint Phalle. In 1958, Putman collaborated with the retail chain Prisunic as Art Director of the Home Department, where her motto was to "design beautiful things for nothing". Her wish of making art available to a larger public also became a reality through Prisunic as she organised with her husband editions of lithographs by famous artists sold for only 100 Francs (1,73 €). In 1968, she distinguished herself in the style agency Mafia until Didier Grumbach spotted her in 1971 and hired her to start a new company which was aimed at developing the textile industry: Créateurs & Industriels. Her intuition led her to reveal many talented designers such as Jean-Charles