Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, decorator

from 5 March to 8 June 2025

History has established Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann as the true champion of the 1925 exhibition. From March 5 to June 8, 2025, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs will open the centennial celebration of the 1925 event with a tribute to this exceptional decorator, through drawings, wallpapers and photographs from its collections.

While he occasionally participated in the decoration through his furnishings of the Pavilion of the Society of Decorative Artists – a project of the French Embassy – it was in the Collector’s Pavilion that he created an original work. In a building commissioned by his friend the architect Pierre Patout, and soon to be known as the Ruhlmann Pavilion, he designed an ideal home, which he completed, in coordination with with nearly fifty artists.

Information

Musée des Arts Décoratifs
107, rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
France
Phone: +33 (0)1 44 55 57 50

• Access
• Opening Hours and Admission Fees

Curator

• Bénédicte Gady, curator in charge of collections of drawings, wallpapers and photographs.
• Assisted by Marion Neveu, assistant curator for wallpaper collections

Présentation
Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann - Décor d'une chambre, page de carnet
Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann - Décor d’une chambre, page de carnet
© Les Arts Décoratifs

As decorator and integrator, Ruhlmann shared the taste of his contemporaries for harmonious and coherent interior designs. But as the heir to a thriving family business in paintings, wallpaper and mirrors, which enabled him to finance his aesthetic dreams, he attached particular importance to the decoration of walls and floors.

The collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs allow us to shed new light on this personal passion. Ruhlmann as a decorator reveals himself through the pages of the twenty-six sketchbooks that his widow left to the institution in 1959, through the wallpapers removed from the walls of the Campus and by exploring the contents of two manufacturing entities, Desfossé & Karth and the French Wallpaper Society (ESSEF), whose goods are conserved by the museum. Ruhlmann designed models for these two workshops, some of which are presented for the first time.

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