Art Deco at 100: The 1925 Paris Exhibition & the Birth of Art Deco Design

In Paris, on April 29, 1925, the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes opened to the public. The exhibition was conceived to highlight the new modern style of design, of which French artists were at the forefront. Over the next six months, over 16 million visitors from 20 different countries streamed through architecture, interior design, graphic design, fashion, jewelry, and other decorative arts exhibitions.

The organizing committee officially commissioned four artists to design posters promoting the exposition to advertise the event and encourage visitors. Each was printed in two different sizes (24×15 and 39×25 inches), and in keeping with pragmatic economic restraints, the posters were designed using only a small handful of colors to help contain expenses.

Ironically, these four posters do not epitomize Art Deco design as subsequent generations have come to understand it. Designed in the lead-up to the event, the imagery is not unified in its theme and appears to represent a lack of messaging on behalf of the organizers with the four artists. Given free rein to interpret the theme of the exposition, two artists focus on the concept of the event’s title, emphasizing the industrial aspect in the show’s name; one is an out-of-place anachronism by an artist who had done significant Art Deco work, and the final image—arguably the most famous—does capture the Art Deco design sensibility.

Robert Bonfils

Robert Bonfils worked as an illustrator, bookbinder, painter, textile designer, set designer, decorator, and professor. Many of his illustrations were woodcuts, and this poster, a lithograph in the style of a woodcut, is a classical allegory of a young girl frolicking in the woods with a gazelle. Above them is a stylized rose—a symbol which became closely associated with the exhibition and the Art Deco movement. This poster was issued in red, black, and white, but a rarer variation was also issued in blue, black, and white.

Charles Loupot

After studying in Lyon, France, Charles Loupot fought and was wounded in the First World War. He returned from the front and settled in Lausanne, where his parents were living, and quickly began his successful career as a poster designer. In 1923, he moved to Paris, where he became one of the leaders of the French Art Deco school of graphic design. He is commonly associated with his colleagues A.M. Cassandre, Jean Carlu, and Paul Colin. His design, printed in only three colors, shows the image of smoke from factory chimneys morphing into the petals of a rose, symbolizing the connection between art and industry, which the exposition was highlighting. As in many of his posters, Loupot uses vibrating tones to frame his image.

Andre Girard

This is by far the rarest of the four posters commissioned for the seminal Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Similar in its use of smoking chimneys to the poster designed by Loupot, André Girard’s image has a much stronger and more dynamic layout. The smokestacks rise in a pyramid that visually echoes the seething mass of men scrambling to get to the top of their pyramid. At the pinnacle, one man holds aloft a chalice, perhaps meant to indicate a form of perfection that all are striving for. As with the other three posters designed for the exhibition, colors are kept to a minimum. Girard went on to greater recognition in the 1930s via the posters he designed for Peugeot, Duco (paints), the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and Columbia Records, for whom he designed numerous posters as well as the first illustrated record sleeves in France.

Émile-Antoine Bourdelle

Three of the four official posters that were commissioned to announce the 1925 Art Deco exhibition were designed by promising young artists with established credentials within the graphic design world. The fourth commission was given to Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, an older sculptor at the peak of his career, who was among the most important of all living French artists. He had both studied and worked with Auguste Rodin and, in turn, was a professor of Matisse and Giacometti. In 1913, his exterior and interior designs for the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées were considered among the very first Art Deco architectural designs in Paris. The title of his painting for the poster, By Labor and by Genius, and the image indicate his bourgeois academic background and connection to the nineteenth-century “official” French art world.

The term Art Deco, allegedly, wasn’t coined for widespread use until a 1966 retrospective exhibition in Paris on the design movements of the 1920s and 30s, and it went into wider use shortly thereafter. However, the design sensibility of Art Deco has near-universal recognition and remains eminently popular and sought after. These four posters, announcing the very show from which this popular movement derived its name, are not the highest form of the art which appears in graphic form, not by a long shot. But they do represent a distinct crossroads in art history. One can only wonder how other artists would have designed them with the benefit of hindsight in the years and decades following the show.