Exhibitions / 1925–2025. Cent ans d’Art déco
1925–2025. Cent ans d’Art déco
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
22 October 2025 – 26 April 2026
Marking the centenary of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, 1925–2025. Cent ans d’Art déco offered a wide-ranging reassessment of the movement and its enduring influence. The inclusion of five previously unpublished photographs of Normandie by Roger Schall brought his archive into dialogue with the objects, environments and forms of modern life through which Art Deco took shape.
Presented at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the exhibition brought together nearly 1,000 works drawn from the museum’s collections and major public and private loans. Furniture, jewellery, glass, fashion, graphic arts and transport traced the development of Art Deco, from its emergence in the 1910s to its lasting influence on contemporary design.
The photographs selected from Roger Schall’s archive documented Normandie, whose synthesis of decorative ambition, technical innovation and modern travel made the ocean liner one of the defining achievements of the period. Presented within the exhibition’s exploration of transport, they demonstrated how his reportage captured Art Deco not only as an aesthetic language, but as an expression of industry, movement and modernity.
For Roger Schall, inclusion in this major museum survey represented an important institutional recognition of the archive as a historical source. Beyond documenting Normandie, the photographs helped articulate the relationship between photography, design and industry, reaffirming his role in shaping the visual memory of interwar modernity.