Saint-Quentin celebrates the 100th anniversary of Art Deco

Saint-Quentin (Aisne). The year 2025 marks the hundredth anniversary of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts which was held in Paris from April 28 to November 30, 1925 and gave its name to Art Deco. Twenty -one country had responded to this huge demonstration. Before the two major fall exhibitions which will take place in Paris at the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Cité du Patrimoine, the city of Saint-Quentin opens the festivities in style.

Saint-Quentin having seen its city center destroyed 70 % at the end of the First World War, the city today highlights its beautiful art deco heritage dating from reconstruction. The old department store in the New Galeries, inaugurated in 1927, was transformed in 2012 into a museum area, the Art Deco Palace. The building owed in 1922 to the architect Sylvère Laville largely retained its original decor, a perfect setting for the exhibition which celebrates the 100th anniversary of this aesthetic.

A course

The scenography of Laura Bodénez and the lighting of Olivier Irthum magnifies a route designed as a walk in certain places of the 1925 exhibition. Large enlargements of vintage photographs show the outside and the interior of these spaces. The visitor goes through cells materialized by colored walls where some of the products were presented in pavilions, shops or palaces are presented. High couture, for example, was divided between the pavilion of elegance and the Grand Palais. The 300 objects are presented in the window except for a few paintings, sculptures and furniture.

The commissioners, Emmanuel Bréon and Anne-Sophie Destrume, did not bring together only artefacts which were exhibited in 1925, but here they restore the art deco taste by equivalents. Thus, a hairdresser and a chair (around 1921) by the cabinetmaker Maurice Dufrène, loaned by the Museum of Decorative Arts, did not appear there, but this cabinetmaker and together was present thanks, in particular, at the “Small Salon” installed in the pavilion “a French embassy”. Likewise, the Luminous fountain (Around 1925-1930) by Marius Sabino evokes the monumental fountain The sources of France by René Lalique who adorned the Esplanade des Invalides.

Clothes and accessories, shoes, makeup and perfumes, dishes, glassware, silverware, furnishings and decorative objects come from many lenders. Museums, of course, but also individuals and businesses with invaluable funds. The Lanvin Heritage entrusted the elements of the “actress lodge” which was staged at the exhibition and in particular the green water dress The Duse (1925, [voir ill.]) that wears a model sitting on a chair Cross Armand Albert Rateau and a set dress and cotton dress printed and golden lamé. THE Toiletries, Marthe Chenal model (1921) loaned by the Louis Vuitton collection evokes, for its part, the box Milano which was presented on the Malletier stand at the Grand Palais.

At the end of the course, a very small section opens a perspective on the international exhibition of arts and techniques applied to modern life of 1937, in Paris always, which marks the passage of art deco to a more radical aesthetic and, for decoration, to a more geometric and stripped aesthetic.