Style Moderne

Style moderne is the French name for what the rest of the world later called Art Deco — the name came afterwards, from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs that introduced it. In France the movement was never about mass production: it was about luxury executed in materials that had to be imported, worked by hand, and finished to a standard no factory could reach.

The vocabulary is therefore material rather than geometric. Shagreen, ivory, lacquer, palmwood and mother-of-pearl; silvered metal by Christofle, lacquer by Dunand, complete interiors by Ruhlmann who designed the room and everything standing in it. Geometry is present, but it is there to discipline the materials rather than to express the machine.

Read it by the finish. French Art Deco is judged by how a surface meets its neighbour — the join between lacquer and shagreen, the reveal around a drawer — and the best pieces are the ones where that join is invisible.

The pre-war years (1910–1920) establish the vocabulary in small numbers for a private clientele.

The Exposition of 1925 is the public moment, and the point at which the style is named and exported.

The 1930s continue it in metal and glass — Adnet, Chareau, Printz — as the geometry hardens and the forms become lighter.