Art Déco French Walnut Sideboard by André Arbus, 1950s

French furniture designer, sculptor, and architect André Arbus was born into a family of cabinetmakers in Toulouse in 1903. He worked in his father’s workshop while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. After graduating, he became artistic director of the family business. In 1925, he began actively presenting his furniture designs in a variety of creative salons and galleries—including the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, and the gallery L’Epoque in Paris—and quickly established a reputation as an innovative furniture designer. In 1932, Arbus moved to Paris, where he advocated a return to French tradition and quality. Inspired by French Classicism, his refined pieces embrace an economy of line as well as, often, luxurious materials such as lacquer, parchment, vellum, and fine wood veneers. He opened his own gallery in Paris in 1935.

In 1939, he exhibited work at the New York World’s Fair (designing the French sections at the Expo in New York and in San Francisco) and was commissioned to do the interiors of the French Ministry of Agriculture. From 1946 onwards, he exhibited widely and worked on a variety of interior design projects and objects, including a series of glass chandelier and light collaborations with the Parisian company Veronese, a variety of sea liner interiors, and a commission for the decoration of the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. (1955). During the 1950s, Arbus turned his attention towards sculpture and began to create unique sculptural furniture objects. His first bronze pieces appeared in 1952, and sculpture remained his primary focus until his death in 1969.

Born in Paris in 1879, designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann (who was also known, confusingly, as Émile Jacques Ruhlmann) was born into an Alsatian family who owned a painting and contracting firm. He spent much of his youth learning the family trade. In 1907, upon his father’s death, the seventeen-year-old Ruhlmann took over the family business. Around 1910, he exhibited his furniture publicly for the first time, and in 1912, he established his own workshop in Paris. In 1919, he founded an interior design company with designer and friend Pierre Laurent known as Établissement Ruhlmann et Laurent. Together, they produced furniture, wallpaper, fabric, lighting, and bronze objects.

While the Arts and Crafts movement influenced Ruhlmann’s earlier work, he is best known as a luminary of 1920s French Art Deco style. Over time, however, his style became more functional and modern, and occasionally even modular. Ruhlmann himself did not work with his hands; prior to 1923, when he set up his own cabinetmaking shop, all of his designs were produced by outside shops. Especially notable works include a variety of glamorous furniture pieces made of rare woods like Brazilian rosewood and Makassar ebony, often embellished with ivory or tortoiseshell details.

Ruhlmann’s designs were purchased both in France and abroad to decorate palaces, political estates, and national museums, including the furnishings for several rooms in the Élysée Palace as well as pieces for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Today, his work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.

Ruhlmann died in Paris in 1933 at the age of 54.