About Rene Prou

The decorator Rene Prou dressed up the Pullman cars with marquetry using exotic wood and lacquer, armchairs, carpeting and bronze lamps designed exclusively for the train. These items became so distinctive and beautiful that the styles transcended into homes. As Art Deco swept across the globe during the inter-war years it touched the design of everything, including travel and transportation. Cars, ocean liners and trains, all symbols of the modern world, helped spread this highly distinctive and glamorous style world-wide. The traditional craftsmanship, modern techniques and exotic materials used by Rene Prou suited the French scene of the 1920's. He exhibited in the Paris exhibition of 1925, which launched the Art Deco movement, he became artistic director of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, and by the 1930's had an international reputation. From 1926 - 1929, Prou was responsible for the design of six VSOE sleeping cars. Each compartment had elegant circles of stylized flowers in an ivory-like inlay set in a checker board design. In 1883, when Georges Nagelmackers, the founder of Compagnie des Wagons-Lits, designed the first train capable of crossing Europe, he inaugurated a new form of travel. The Pullman Orient Express was decorated by great artists such as Rene Prou, Paul Nelson and Rene Lalique and boasted the most celebrated names of the age among its patrons. Inaugurated in 1929 on the Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam line, the interior decoration was an original design by the architect Rene Prou, who remains one of the great decorators of the "Art Deco" period, renowned for his work on cruise ships, apartment buildings and luxury hotels. He entrusted to the master jeweler and glassmaker Rene Lalique the design of pressed glass panels with decorative motifs inspired by fauna, flora and the female body embedded in the Cuban mahogany paneling. Decorated by Rene Prou, the walls were paneled with burr birch from Finland and "Art Deco" baggage racks were manufactured in white metal. The "Art Deco" lamps were designed by Rene Prou in polished bronze and the interior was refitted to ensure outstanding comfort for travelers. Prou added " "Cote d'Azur-type Pullman" armchairs that became the style for home use. Despite the restrained circumstances under the war years, the design objects of Prou and others during the period emanate self-confidence, freely embracing unusual materials, bold forms, frank color and a lightheartedness that was out of tune with the times, particularly during the Vichy years (1940-44). The use of wrought iron in the decorative arts of this period well illustrates the wartime scarcity of materials. This ordinary metal was often gilded, as in the legs of a marble-topped console by Poillerat, or treated like bronze to give the appearance of opulence, as in a pair of floor candleholders by Subes. Other times it was tempered with historical quotation, as in Rene Prou's pair of armchairs in white wrought iron with yellow cushions, where the curlicue armature ironically echoes a Louis XVI original.