Emile Jacques Ruhlmann, art deco designer

Magazine Antiques, July, 2004 by Jared Goss

Though the French art deco designer Emile Jacques Ruhlmann (1) (Fig. 2) is today best known for his luxurious, costly, and frequently extravagant furniture, he was in fact, a full-fledged interior designer--an ensemblier who was both able and willing to provide all aspects of a decor from the architectural framework to the upholstery textiles. (2) Indeed, to fully understand his furniture it must be considered within the context of completed interiors in which every element played a specific and carefully thought-out functional or decorative role. Regretfully, however, few of Ruhlmann's interiors remain today. Nonetheless, it is possible to get a sense of the sensual richness, exquisite preciousness, and almost perverse sophistication of these environments from the large number of archival drawings and photographs that survive. (3)

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Ruhlmann was raised to inherit a household contracting business in Paris founded by his mother's family in 1827. After Ruhlmann's parents were married in 1873, his father, Francois Ruhlmann (1847-1907), gained control of the business and eponymously renamed it. The company provided services such as painting, plastering, wallpapering, and the making of mirror glass--standard aspects of the building trade. On his father's death in 1907, Ruhlmann took over the family business and set about renaming it again and reinventing its mission, ultimately turning it into one of the most renowned design enterprises of its day.

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After forming a partnership with Pierre Laurent in 1919, Ruhlmann eventually added design studios, workshops, and showrooms (as well as the necessary business offices) to their premises (Fig. 1), while employing upwards of fifty designers, craftsmen, and administrative staff. Etablissements Ruhlmann et Laurent was thus able to produce a large portion of their work in-house; what they were not able to accomplish themselves, such as the weaving of carpets and textiles or the manufacture of porcelain and glass, they contracted out to established makers such as Prelle et Compagnie of Lyon and the Sevres porcelain manufactory. With an operation of this size, Ruhlmann himself eventually began to function as something of an artistic director, if not actually designing then supervising, overseeing, and approving every aspect down to the smallest detail. The business remained in operation until shortly after Ruhlmann's death in 1933.

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With such resources at hand, it is not surprising that Ruhlmann's most successful projects were those over which he had total aesthetic control. His ideal was to closely supervise each step in the design and manufacture of every conceivable element. (4) He took as much interest in minutiae like molding profiles or the proportions of bronze mounts as in practical specifications like joinery techniques or the selection of wood veneers or even the emotional and sensory effects of color and lighting. He was thus working within the well-established tradition (a tradition of which he was aware) of the great architect-designers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Robert (1728-1792) and James Adam (1730-1794) in England and Scotland and Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre Francois Leonard Fontaine (1762-1853) in France, who created interiors of exceptional aesthetic unity. (5)

For the purpose of analysis, Ruhlmann's career can be easily divided into three phases: an early period from 1913 to approximately 1922 (including World War I); a mature period from 1922 to 1928; and a late period from 1928 until 1933.

Despite his lack of formal training as a designer, Ruhlmann became interested in creating furniture, decorative objects, and interiors at a young age, though most of his earliest ideas never progressed beyond the sketches he made in the copious notebooks he kept throughout his life. His first foray into furniture design came in the guise of so-called precious furniture--delicate pieces that would hardly qualify as practical household furniture. These objects were often decorated with figural motifs including dancing maidens, birds, or baskets of flowers (the pages of Ruhlmann's notebooks are filled with such designs). While not typically associated with him, Ruhlmann's delight in this sort of decoration is in fact characteristic of his earliest and least-known work, and he adapted the motifs--as he would do with more abstract motifs later in his career--for a variety of carpets, wallpapers, and textiles, all of which were certainly designed around the time of World War I. Ruhlmann's precious furniture is typified by the sumptuous and delicate gilded jewel cabinet shown in Plate VI, with its richly carved decoration, shimmering surface, and impossibly slender legs. Another work, his well-known Chariot sideboard (Pl. V), designed in 1919, has its figural decoration rendered in ivory and mahogany marquetry (see Pl. IV). With its odd combination of vaguely mythological imagery and obvious theatricality, it is no surprise to learn that the charioteer motif was supplied to Ruhlmann by Maurice Picaud (also known as Pico), a designer for the Folies Bergere in Paris.