Art Déco : France-Chine

At the 1925 Paris Decorative Arts Exhibition, the Chinese pavilion attracted attention, while its architect, Liu Jipiao, imported French Art Deco into his country shortly afterwards. French artists, such as Süe et Mare, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, René Buthaud and Gaston Suisse, were introduced to the art of lacquerware or reinterpreted motifs from Chinese art, while Chinese artists borrowed the geometric forms of Art Deco by introducing their ideograms.

This book by Emmanuel Bréon, head of the Department of Paintings at the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine and creator of the Musée des années 30 in Boulogne-Billancourt, which he directed from 1983 to 2008, analyses the reciprocal influences on fashion, photography, cinema, architecture and decorative arts. He recalls the moment when French Art Deco seduced Sun Yat-Sen's China in the early 1920s.