For Artwork Deco, the French-led Modernist type that flourished between the world wars, this autumn is a peak 100 years within the making. The centenary exhibition at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Artwork Deco (till 26 April 2026) leads the institutional cost, with smaller programmes on the metropolis’s Musée Zadkine and Cité de l’Structure et du Patrimoine. A poster-centred survey on the London Transport Museum enhances them from throughout the Channel.
However Deco has additionally been reverberating throughout the worldwide artwork truthful circuit all season. Eileen Grey’s celebrated Dragon armchair (1917-19)—offered in 2009 for $28m at Christie’s from the gathering of designer Yves Saint Laurent and his associate Pierre Bergé—was redisplayed on the FAB Paris truthful in September. At PAD London final month, Galerie Jacques Lacoste showcased a devoted Deco stand underpinned by items by Diego Giacometti, and centered Deco shows are deliberate at Salon Artwork + Design truthful on the Park Avenue Armory, New York (6-10 November). A lot exercise demonstrates that this historic motion by no means fairly left the stage.
Artwork Deco is greater than a mode—it’s a language of magnificence, rhythm and stability
From furnishings to theatre and structure
To grasp the class’s resilience, begin with the title. “Artwork Deco” is a post-war contraction of arts décoratifs (ornamental arts); contemporaries within the Nineteen Twenties favoured the broader time period le type moderne (the trendy type).
The design idiom got here into focus on the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a Paris commerce truthful that stretched from the Grand Palais to the Esplanade des Invalides and drew round 16 million guests. It spanned furnishings, theatre and structure and crystallised the position of the ensemblier—the designer of whole interiors—with Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann as its best-known practitioner.
Based on Félix Marcilhac, the proprietor and director of Galerie Marcilhac in Paris, the type mixed “conventional cabinetmaking strategies and splendid supplies like lacquer, shagreen [a type of rawhide], uncommon woods and superb marquetry, in continuity with the craftsmanship of the 18th century”.
Priorities tilted in direction of mass manufacturing over hand-finishing after the Second World Struggle, and the type fell out of favour. “By the late Sixties, Artwork Deco had been nearly totally forgotten,” Marcilhac says, pointing to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’ 1966 exhibition Les Années 25: Artwork Deco, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Esprit Nouveau for successfully naming and revitalising the motion. Specialist dealerships adopted, together with the gallery based by his father, Félix Marcilhac Sr, in 1969.
In October, Galerie Marcilhac inaugurated its second house in Paris. It’s going to showcase first- and second-generation Deco designers from Eugène Printz to André Arbus at Salon Artwork + Design this month.
“Artwork Deco stays a residing design language,” Marcilhac tells The Artwork Newspaper. “Because the gallery’s basis, now we have noticed new dynamics: broader geographical demand, notably in the USA and Asia, in addition to extra numerous purchaser profiles, with youthful collectors more and more drawn to each the patrimonial worth and the ornamental sophistication of those works.”
Youthful designers verify this pull. “There’s an enormous draw to Artwork Deco proper now,” says Alex Bass, the founder and chief government of the New York artwork advisory and inside design studio Salon 21. She sees demand on twin tracks: some purchasers pursue a complete Deco scheme whereas others search for a single assertion piece.
“As we speak, when folks say ‘Artwork Deco’, they’re normally referring to that blend of classic glam and daring, symmetrical design, reasonably than anybody particular designer or decade,” Bass says, including that the style’s world breadth “permits collectors to faucet into a mode that feels common, whereas nonetheless providing distinctive regional expressions”.
Not only a French fancy
Artwork Deco’s attain was worldwide from the outset. A decreased model of the 1925 Paris exposition toured the US the next yr, visiting 9 cities from New York to Detroit, whereas artists and designers comparable to Jules Leleu, René Lalique and Sonia Delaunay expanded the idiom’s attain throughout continental Europe and past.
The Crescent, one among a string of Artwork Deco lodges inbuilt Miami Seaside within the Nineteen Thirties and 40s
Photograph: courtesy Artwork Deco Alive!
“Artwork Deco is greater than a mode—it’s a language of magnificence, rhythm and stability that has spoken to generations throughout a century,” says Laura Tsoukala, the proprietor and director of the Athens-based Stefanidou Tsoukala Gallery, which has constructed an Artwork Deco programme over a number of years along with specialising in Greek artists and designers. Attributing the idiom’s transcultural enchantment to its sustained dialogue with antiquity, the gallery drew the comparability immediately at PAD London by displaying armchairs by Leleu. “Their sculptural volumes recall the poise and power of classical statuary,” Tsoukala says. “One can see the classical spirit reinterpreted—antiquity reborn in fashionable type.”
This universality additionally underpins a brand new initiative this season. The Artwork Deco Alive! programme has organised linked occasions in consecutive months in two cities with the biggest concentrations of Deco structure worldwide: Miami in October, and Mumbai this month.
“We had been struck by the uncanny parallels,” Artwork Deco Alive! co-founder Salma Service provider Rahmathulla tells The Artwork Newspaper. “Each are coastal cities formed by migration, and each are residence to outstanding Artwork Deco structure… That felt like an untold story ready to be shared.”
For Rahmathulla, the draw is each aesthetic and civic: “Artwork Deco has a capability to adapt and mirror the spirit of every place, whereas nonetheless feeling immediately recognisable. It’s each world and native, timeless and well timed.”
Alex Bass equally sees the present momentum as topical reasonably than nostalgic. “I believe it’s telling that developing on 100 years of Deco we face an identical expertise now with fast technological booms,” she says. “As we search refuge from the pace and noise of contemporary life, Deco gives a serene, harmonious aesthetic.” A century on, Artwork Deco reads as a shared common language that pulls cities and cultures, the commerce and establishments into one dialog—from Paris to Mumbai, and in all places between.
1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Artwork Deco, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, till 26 April 2026
