The Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris is celebrating a century of elegance and modernity with its major exhibition "1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco." From luxury craftsmanship to architecture, from furniture to fashion, visitors enter a vibrant universe that showcases the full richness of this first global artistic movement. The exhibition demonstrates how Art Deco radiated throughout the world, carried by its audacity, refinement, and modernity during the roaring twenties in Paris.
To fully appreciate the heritage celebrated by today's exhibition, one must return to that founding moment when France, still marked by World War I, launched the International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts from April to November 1925. Spanning from Place de la Concorde to the Esplanade des Invalides, passing through the Grand Palais, the exhibition offered its 15 million visitors an unprecedented panorama of modernity: 150 pavilions, 20,000 creators, and twenty-one invited countries unveiled the best of their creations. The United States, aware of their lag in this field, did not participate officially but sent numerous observers, already prepared to draw inspiration from what they would discover.
This spectacular event marked the pinnacle of what would become known as Art Deco, a movement that would radiate worldwide. The term "Art Deco" was officially adopted in 1966, during the exhibition "The 1925 Years" at the Museum of Decorative Arts. Serving as a true showcase of modernity, the 1925 exhibition embraced all domains of creation: furniture, architecture, fashion, jewelry, design, ceramics, posters, and textiles.
French decorators and architects quickly embraced this new artistic language, exploring all its possibilities. In the French pavilions, every detail testified to the excellence and refinement of the country's craftsmanship. With "A French Embassy," the Society of Decorative Artists (SAD), the event's organizer, brought together the most prominent creators, each oscillating between modernity and classicism. This assumed clash of styles embodied the vitality and creativity of the host country.
Among these creators, André Groult (1884-1966) stood out with his anthropomorphic chest of drawers made entirely of curves and shagreen (fish leather), while Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) created the spectacular desk-library for the ambassador, reinstalled in a reconstructed setting with its domed ceiling and visible on the third floor of the 2025 exhibition. Colored drawings from an album published by Charles Moreau testify to the freedom given to creators during "a flourishing period marked by a thirst for novelty, speed, and freedom."
Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann (1879-1933), often called the "Pope of Art Deco," monopolized attention with his "Collector's Hotel." Often compared to Jean-Henri Riesener, the cabinetmaker to Louis XVI, this furniture designer embodied the pinnacle of Art Deco by himself. Conceived as the imaginary residence of an equally imaginary collector, he surrounded himself with architect Pierre Patout and about forty artists and craftsmen. The result was a succession of rooms with extremely refined décor.
Ruhlmann's furniture perfectly summarized the Art Deco spirit: pure, elongated forms, finely rhythmic, mastery of detail, crafted in precious materials, notably Macassar ebony, his signature. Elegant and sometimes considered ostentatious, his style remained profoundly modern. One of his cabinets could cost more than an individual house. "Beauty and grandeur had no price," said the man nicknamed the Pope of Art Deco. In the late 1920s, Ruhlmann experimented with unprecedented combinations of wood and metal before his premature death in 1933. His furniture is highly sought after today.
While there was no official Art Deco style, its creators, despite very different aesthetic approaches, shared the same desire: to propose a new vision, each responding with their own sensibility. To illustrate this diversity, the exhibition highlights two emblematic figures absent from the 1925 exhibition. Contrary to the refined luxury of the great furniture designers of the era, Jean-Michel Frank (1895-1941) imposed himself with his minimalist and stripped-down interiors featuring singular materials: mica, shagreen, straw marquetry, or plaster. These ensembles were described by writer François Mauriac as "poor luxury."
Another important figure of this movement was Eileen Gray (1878-1976). This Irish-born artist created some of the most beautiful minimalist interiors of the 1920s. She was one of the first to use tubular steel for her furniture. "Her pieces are now the stars of all auctions in which they appear, breaking increasingly vertiginous records and embodying, in all its diversity, Art Deco," notes Anne Monier Vanryb, exhibition curator and curator of the 1910-1960 collections at the Museum of Decorative Arts.
Born in the 1910s following European reflections on ornamentation, Art Deco drew from Art Nouveau research. It fully developed in the 1920s and was distinguished by a structured, geometric, elegant aesthetic that combined modernity and preciousness, reacting against the previous style's softened forms and vegetal inspiration, now dubbed "noodle style." In this vibrant Paris, a center of attraction for artists worldwide, Art Deco was built at the crossroads of multiple influences: 18th century, antiquity (Egypt, Greece), distant arts (Africa, Orient), and cubism.
From these sources emerged a common vocabulary: baskets, stylized bestiary, octagonal forms, precious woods, marquetry, shagreen, and lacquer. All museum departments drew from their reserves to select pieces illustrating the styles that inspired creators and how this movement was built. Examples include Paul Follot's chair with basket motifs borrowed from the 18th century, jewelry of Oriental or Egyptian inspiration, tableware, and posters.
The world of fashion and textile arts is also represented, such as a jacket with geometric patterns by artist Sonia Delaunay and the "Little Horses" dress by great couturier Madeleine Vionnet, fascinated by ancient Greece. In a society in transformation, eager to forget the war and reconnect with pleasures, Art Deco offered an idealized vision while living conditions remained difficult for many.
This style adapted poorly to mass production, and its distribution through department stores remained limited. It was mainly poster art that conveyed this new aesthetic: pure geometric forms in bold colors imposed themselves in urban space to promote cinema, shows, and leisure. Technical progress and the development of transportation (automobile, airplane, ocean liner, train), speed and travel, synonymous with luxury and modernity, became privileged themes for graphic designers.
This fascination for modern transport finds particular echo in the exhibition with a mythical train: the Orient Express. A restored cabin from the Étoile du Nord (1929) is installed under the nave, in dialogue with life-size models of the Orient Express reimagined by Maxime d'Angeac. The architect-decorator was originally to imagine the future Orient Express. But in 2015, research by Arthur Mettetal, historian and railway specialist, led him to find thirteen cars from 1920 in good condition, abandoned near the Belarusian border.
The company, bought by SNCF and the Accor group leading this project, decided on the restoration and refurbishment of these century-old cars. Maxime d'Angeac reconnected with the Art Deco furniture designer tradition by surrounding himself with thirty craftsmen and artisans to imagine a train as a total work of art. As an exhibition partner, Orient Express reveals the first elements of the future train, in dialogue with unpublished archives.
To understand what this train represents, one must return to its birth. In 1883, Belgian industrialist Georges Nagelmackers imagined the impossible: a train crossing Europe from Paris to Constantinople "with a level of sophistication inspired by ocean liners, then pioneers of luxurious long-distance travel." Everything materialized on October 4, 1883, during the triumphant inaugural journey of the Orient Express, to which journalists and writers were invited.
In the midst of orientalism, the Orient Express acquired mythical aura. It was the fastest means of transport to reach Constantinople from one of the major cities served by the train from 1888. The Orient was the company's flagship product, connecting Paris to Constantinople in less than three days when it previously took about three months a century earlier. A symbol of refined travel and French craftsmanship, the Orient Express experienced its golden age in the 1920s.
The International Sleeping Car Company then called upon great creators like René Prou and René and Suzanne Lalique. Their cars, among the most luxurious ever put into circulation, made the train a true Art Deco manifesto. The company gained on all fronts: it offered passengers exceptional comfort as well as spectacular décor and became an ambassador of this artistic style, spreading it through the territories it crossed.
The Orient Express renaissance is scheduled for 2027, interpreting in minute detail the Art Deco spirit of the 1920s and offering French luxury and unparalleled comfort. The exhibition "1925-2025: 100 Years of Art Deco" can be discovered at the Museum of Decorative Arts until April 26, 2026.
