Exhibition “1925–2025

The exhibition “1925–2025. One Hundred Years of Art Deco” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris marks the centenary of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, from which the Art Deco style took its name and won worldwide recognition.

The exhibition treats Art Deco as a global artistic phenomenon that shaped the visual language of the twentieth century, from architecture and interiors to fashion, graphic art and industrial design. Some one thousand exhibits are on display in the museum’s galleries, including furniture, interior furnishings, jewellery, textiles, clothing, posters and architectural designs. Pride of place goes to the work of the style’s key figures, such as Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray and Jean-Michel Frank, as well as the jewellery houses of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels.

The exhibition shows, step by step, how Art Deco married the luxury of craftsmanship to the ideas of modernity, the machine aesthetic, geometry and exotic motifs, and how the style became the visual emblem of the optimism of the interwar years.

One of the most impressive sections is a reconstruction of interiors and objects associated with travel and speed, among them carriages of the legendary Orient Express, underscoring the link between Art Deco and the idea of progress and elite comfort.

The final part of the exhibition is devoted to the legacy of Art Deco and its influence on design at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, which makes the show not merely a historical retrospective but also a reflection on the longevity of a style.

On the whole, this is one of the most comprehensive and conceptually coherent exhibitions on Art Deco ever shown in Paris, intended for specialists and for the attentive visitor without professional training alike