A centenary of style: why Art Deco’s market appeal is evergreen – The Art Newspaper

For Art Deco, the French-led Modernist style that flourished between the world wars, this autumn is a peak 100 years in the making. The centenary exhibition at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco (until 26 April 2026) leads the institutional charge, with smaller programmes at the city’s Musée Zadkine and Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. A poster-centred survey at the London Transport Museum complements them from across the Channel.

But Deco has also been reverberating across the international art fair circuit all season. Eileen Gray’s celebrated Dragon armchair (1917-19)—sold in 2009 for $28m at Christie’s from the collection of designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé—was redisplayed at the FAB Paris fair in September. At PAD London last month, Galerie Jacques Lacoste showcased a dedicated Deco stand underpinned by pieces by Diego Giacometti, and focused Deco presentations are planned at Salon Art + Design fair at the Park Avenue Armory, New York (6-10 November). So much activity demonstrates that this historic movement never quite left the stage.

From furniture to theatre and architecture

To understand the category’s resilience, start with the name. “Art Deco” is a post-war contraction of arts décoratifs (decorative arts); contemporaries in the 1920s favoured the broader term le style moderne (the modern style).

The design idiom came into focus at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a Paris trade fair that stretched from the Grand Palais to the Esplanade des Invalides and drew around 16 million visitors. It spanned furniture, theatre and architecture and crystallised the role of the ensemblier—the designer of total interiors—with Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann as its best-known practitioner.

According to Félix Marcilhac, the owner and director of Galerie Marcilhac in Paris, the style combined “traditional cabinetmaking techniques and luxurious materials like lacquer, shagreen [a type of rawhide], rare woods and fine marquetry, in continuity with the craftsmanship of the 18th century”.

Priorities tilted towards mass production over hand-finishing after the Second World War, and the style fell out of favour. “By the late 1960s, Art Deco had been almost entirely forgotten,” Marcilhac says, pointing to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’ 1966 exhibition Les Années 25: Art Deco, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Esprit Nouveau for effectively naming and revitalising the movement. Specialist dealerships followed, including the gallery founded by his father, Félix Marcilhac Sr, in 1969.

In October, Galerie Marcilhac inaugurated its second space in Paris. It will showcase first- and second-generation Deco designers from Eugène Printz to André Arbus at Salon Art + Design this month.

“Art Deco remains a living design language,” Marcilhac tells The Art Newspaper. “Since the gallery’s foundation, we have observed new dynamics: broader geographical demand, notably in the United States and Asia, as well as more diverse buyer profiles, with younger collectors increasingly drawn to both the patrimonial value and the decorative sophistication of these works.”

Younger designers confirm this pull. “There’s a huge draw to Art Deco right now,” says Alex Bass, the founder and chief executive of the New York art advisory and interior design studio Salon 21. She sees demand on twin tracks: some clients pursue a total Deco scheme while others look for a single statement piece.

“Today, when people say ‘Art Deco’, they’re usually referring to that mix of vintage glam and bold, symmetrical design, rather than any one specific designer or decade,” Bass says, adding that the genre’s global breadth “allows collectors to tap into a style that feels universal, while still offering unique regional expressions”.

Not just a French fancy

Art Deco’s reach was international from the outset. A reduced version of the 1925 Paris exposition toured the US the following year, visiting nine cities from New York to Detroit, while artists and designers such as Jules Leleu, René Lalique and Sonia Delaunay expanded the idiom’s reach across continental Europe and beyond.

“Art Deco is more than a style—it is a language of elegance, rhythm and balance that has spoken to generations across a century,” says Laura Tsoukala, the owner and director of the Athens-based Stefanidou Tsoukala Gallery, which has built an Art Deco programme over several years in addition to specialising in Greek artists and designers. Attributing the idiom’s transcultural appeal to its sustained dialogue with antiquity, the gallery drew the comparison directly at PAD London by showing armchairs by Leleu. “Their sculptural volumes recall the poise and strength of classical statuary,” Tsoukala says. “One can see the classical spirit reinterpreted—antiquity reborn in modern form.”

This universality also underpins a new initiative this season. The Art Deco Alive! programme has organised linked events in consecutive months in two cities with the largest concentrations of Deco architecture worldwide: Miami in October, and Mumbai this month.

“We were struck by the uncanny parallels,” Art Deco Alive! co-founder Salma Merchant Rahmathulla tells The Art Newspaper. “Both are coastal cities shaped by migration, and both are home to remarkable Art Deco architecture… That felt like an untold story waiting to be shared.”

For Rahmathulla, the draw is both aesthetic and civic: “Art Deco has an ability to adapt and reflect the spirit of each place, while still feeling instantly recognisable. It’s both global and local, timeless and timely.”

Alex Bass equally sees the current momentum as topical rather than nostalgic. “I think it’s telling that coming up on 100 years of Deco we are facing a similar experience now with rapid technological booms,” she says. “As we seek refuge from the speed and noise of modern life, Deco provides a serene, harmonious aesthetic.” A century on, Art Deco reads as a shared universal language that pulls cities and cultures, the trade and institutions into one conversation—from Paris to Mumbai, and everywhere between.

• 1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, until 26 April 2026