rt Deco is 100 years old and to mark the occasion museums all over the world have joined together to present exhibitions, lectures, and even a period-themed ball in celebration of one of the world’s most influential design and architecture movements.


Art Deco is an abbreviation of “Arts Décoratifs,” French for decorative art. It was coined to characterize the newly “modernist” decorative arts and design exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925. The style embraced geometric forms, bold colors, and an overall air of elegance and luxury, bridging the gap between organic Art Nouveau and the sleek machine-made world of modernism. 


Art Deco spread in popularity throughout Europe and America in the 1920s, having a profound influence on creative fields as diverse as art, fashion, design, architecture, and film. But the qualities in design that defined Art Deco — fine craftsmanship, elegance, bold colors, and expensive materials — made it an elite style and it fell out of favor following the Great Depression and the rise of the utilitarian, mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus. 


Today the aesthetic legacy of Art Deco lives on in everything from skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building in New York to the architectural complex that is the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Claridge’s, the iconic London hotel, was redesigned in Art Deco style in the late 1920s by architect Basil Ionides. Designers as diverse as Karl Springer and Peter Marino have expressed admiration and debt to Art Deco aesthetics.


Furniture and interior designers Jules Leleu, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Jacques Adnet, glass artist René Lalique, jeweler Louis Cartier, artists Tamara de Lempicka and Erté, and furniture designer and couturier Paul Poiret are just some of the names we associate today with the flourishing of Art Deco in Europe and America in the opening decades of the 20th century. They also feature prominently in the exhibitions throughout 2025 celebrating the centennial of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Here are some exhibitions and events related to the Art Deco centenary happening in 2025.




Tamara de Lempicka: 
The Making of an Art Deco Icon


De Young Museum, 
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Through February 9


Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

March 9 through May 26


This is the first major exhibition in the United States dedicated to the Polish-born Paris-based Art Deco painter whose work synonymized the Roaring Twenties. The show pairs Art Deco objects, sculptures, and fashion from the museum’s collection with 150 of Lempicka’s paintings and drawings ranging from early, colorful post-Cubist portraits and still life paintings produced in the 1920s in Paris to her later nudes and glamorous Art Deco-inspired portraits of the wealthy in a classical figural style for which today she is best known.




Art Deco City: New York Postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection

Museum of the City of New York

Through February 17


This exhibition tells the story of how colorful and mass-produced postcards played a role in establishing Art Deco landmarks in New York, including the Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center, as international icons that came to define the city as a center of modern architecture, art and design. The exhibition includes over 250 postcards (on loan from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) along with artifacts, film footage, photography, drawings, and other archival material relating to Art Deco that shaped New York’s image to the world as a cosmopolitan and cultured modern metropolis.




Echoes of Art Deco 

Villa Empain, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels

Through May 25


The Brussels region is preparing a broad program of events to spotlight the country’s rich Art Deco heritage, to be unveiled in early 2025. It will kick off with the exhibition “Echoes of Art Deco” at the Villa Empain in Brussels, a thematic show exploring the social and cultural history of Art Deco in Brussels with exhibits ranging from period furniture and drawings to ceramics, woodwork, ironwork, and examples of stained glass.




Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann

Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris

March 12 to June 8, 2025


The Musée des Arts Décoratifs has planned an entire year of celebrations for the centennial of the 1925 Paris exhibition starting with a reinstallation of its Art Deco collections and a small display devoted to the 1925 exhibition. The first major show is a tribute to Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, the Parisian designer and decorator who perhaps more than anyone helped shape and popularize Art Deco. His historical drawings, wallpapers, models for interiors, and archival photographs from the museum’s collections make up the exhibition including twenty-six sketchbooks donated to the museum in 1959.

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann for the Société anonyme des Anciens Etablissements Desfossé & Kart. Sample of wallpaper with repetitive pattern Flower Bed, 1917. Paper, cylinder printing. Inv. RI 2022.3.1077. © Christophe Dellière / les Arts décoratifs.





F. Edwin Church (1876–1975), Girl in Yellow, ca. 1920. Oil on canvas. Loan made possible by the F. Edwin Church (1876–1975) Catalogue Raisonné Project. Image courtesy of Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY.


Deco at 100

Nassau County Museum of Art, New York

January 18 – June 15


This exhibition tells the story of life on Long Island in the 1920s and 1930s through period decorative arts, visual art, and social archives documenting the beginnings of suburbia. Works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Fernand Léger, Guy Pène du Bois, Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelman, and Reginald Marsh are paired with documentary images of Art Deco architecture and the social scene on Long Island’s Gold Coast, along with period furniture, fashion, and the graphic arts.


Paul Howard Manship (1885–1966), Flight of Europa, 1925. Bronze with partial gilding. Gerald Peters Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY.




Sylvie Féron, desk, 1932. Mahogany wood, plywood, veneer, bronze, plastic. 74.3 x 110 x 54 cm. Coll. King Baudouin Foundation, Marie-Jeanne Dauchy Fund, entrusted to the Design Museum Brussels. Picture: Andy Simon


Art Deco: The Style of a Society in the Throes of Change

BELvue Museum, Brussels

June 4 through January 4, 2026


This show explores the transition between Art Nouveau and Art Deco and the social, economic, and cultural changes in Europe following World War I through a selection of Art Deco pieces drawn from the various collections of the King Baudouin Foundation. Displays include sculptures by the artists Marcel Wolfers and Oscar Jespers, ceramic vases by Charles Catteau, glassware by Val Saint Lambert, decorative tiles, book bindings, furniture, medals, and more.




Paul Poiret, Robe du soir Joséphine, 1907. © Les Arts Décoratifs / Jean Tholance.


Paul Poiret, Couturier, Decorator and Perfumer

Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris

June 25 to January 11, 2026


Following the Ruhlmann tribute show The Musée des Arts Décoratifs will present a new exhibition dedicated to Paul Poiret, an innovative, influential fashion designer and stylist known for striking silhouettes in bold solid colors. The exhibition also makes a case for his lesser-known creative endeavors in fields as diverse as interior and set design, the various decorative arts, perfumery, and gastronomy.




Rose Iron Works: From Art Nouveau to Art Deco

Cleveland Museum of Art

July 6 – October 19


The Cleveland Museum of Art is presenting Rose Iron Works: From Art Nouveau to Art Deco, an exhibition tracking the designs of the ornamental blacksmith Martin Rose, who emigrated from Hungary to Cleveland where he produced some of the most spectacular Art Deco ironwork in America. The exhibition will focus on Rose’s sculptural commissions from the 1930s, including several important pieces from the museum’s permanent collection.