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# The term “Art Deco” is an abbreviation of the French Arts Décoratifs from the official title of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/termin-ar-deko-iavliaetsia-sokrashcheniem-ot-frantsuzskogo-arts-decoratifs-iz-ofitsialnogo-nazvaniia-mezhdunarodnoi-vystavki-dekorativnogo-iskusstva-i-khudozhestvennoi-promyshlennosti-1/
- Published: 2026-01-26T08:06:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:27:13.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Architecture, Art, Museums, Observations, Paris

The term “Art Deco” is an abbreviation of the French Arts Décoratifs from the official title of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. To mark the centenary, the exhibition Paris 1925 has opened at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in the Trocadéro, in Paris. The museum itself could hardly be said to occupy a top place in the guidebooks, so this is an excellent pretext to visit a point on the city’s map that is not the most heavily advertised but is very beautiful and full of meaning.

The display is devoted for the most part to the architectural side, but the sense of how weighty the whole movement is for modern culture does not suffer for it. Paris is presented as the centre where Art Deco took shape, and the curators show how architects and designers tried to rethink the idea of “modernity” in post-war Europe.

The volume of documentary material is impressive: archival photographs, drawings, models of pavilions and visual reconstructions that allow one to imagine the scale and atmosphere of the original exhibition of 1925\. The display creates a feeling of immersion in the period and conveys its optimism, its faith in technological progress and its striving for a new aesthetic language. A hundred years on, it is amusing to look at the handsome fantasies of a future that never came.

Attention is concentrated on architects, among them Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret and Robert Mallet-Stevens. Yet the concentration on individual figures and projects somewhat narrows the focus and limits the variety of artistic and design trends represented at the exhibition of 1925\. When one hears of an exhibition on Art Deco, one imagines a great number of objects of decorative art, furniture and product design; here, however, the subject is chiefly architecture, models and sketches.

For anyone intending to go, I would note that this is not some grandiose undertaking but a rather compact exhibition. The exhibition space is comparatively small and is located not in the most conspicuous hall of the museum, which gives a sense of intimacy not quite commensurate with the historical sweep of the theme. But the presentation of the material is at the level of

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