“Planned originally for 1915 and delayed by the outbreak of World War One until 1925, this great exhibition of chiefly French decoration, fashion and architecture launched across the planet the Art Deco style which came to dominate international design until the 1940s.

Our lecture will trace the origins of the Exposition in the inauguration of the Musée des arts décoratifs at the Louvre in 1905 and the militancy of the great French decorators of the Art Nouveau era, notably Guimard, Grasset and Francis Jourdain. At the exposition itself we will see how the revival of fine craftmanship and the use of luxurious materials championed by the best Art Deco designers – Ruhlman, Follot, Sauvage, Brandt, Prou – clashed with the radical Modernism promoted by Konstantin Melnikov in the pavilion of the Soviet Union, the Mallet-Stevens Information pavilion and famously in Le Corbusier’s Pavilion of the New Spirit. In this last pavilion of the 1925 Exposition we will indeed witness the seeds of the design trends of the first decades of our own 21st century.