Horta Museum: Spotlight on stunning Art Deco textiles and overlooked artists

Brussels’ 2025 Art Deco centenary rolls on with a new exhibition at the Horta Museum showcasing the movement’s stylistically distinctive and perennially popular colourful patterns and decoration.

All Over recounts the fascinating history of textile design between 1910 and 1945 – a final era of ornamental decoration amid a period of rapid social change. It gave rise to a new aesthetic, Art Deco, which emerged at the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925.

The museum’s celebration of this creative outburst focuses on the motifs that decorated wallpaper, carpets and furnishing fabrics. Some 92 exhibits, many of them on show for the first time, reveal how a variety of artistic patterns flourished in the interwar era, from swirling florals to graphic linear designs, subdued hues to dazzling colour schemes.

In addition to exhibiting the diversity and richness of these motifs, another important thread shows how these revolutionary styles filtered down from the luxury interiors of the wealthy to less affluent households.

While challenging preconceived ideas of Art Deco style, this small but fascinating exhibition provides a welcome spotlight on a generation of artists, in particular women, whose names have long remained in the shadows. By featuring intenational as well as Belgian designers, it provides a global context to the movement, explains curator Benjamin Zurstrassen.

A series of framed prints and publicity posters reveal how innovation in design was diffused to the public via Brussels’ deparment stores L’Inno and the former Vanderborght establishment. Cinema was another key medium of communication as illustrated in extracts from the spellbinding 1923 French film L’Inhumaine (pictured). The sci-fi drama by Marcel L’Herbier is full of stylish interiors and served as an early manifesto for the Art Deco movement with its uninhibited air of modernity and positivism.  

A room filled with 38 framed designs and original sketches, some on graph paper, dazzle with their intemporal and kaleidoscope patterns. Created for velvet upholstery, the unsigned works include exceptional pieces from the Van Hoe Collection.

One artist spotlighted with examples of his colourful wallpaper designs (pictured above) is Victor Servranckx, a well-known Belgian abstract painter and designer who was a cohort of René Magritte and other avant-garde creatives.

Following this display of fabrics that were accessible to the middle classes, the focus switches to two textile design duos who created harmonised ensembles for the interiors of a more elite clientele. A series of wall hangings and display cabinets introduce elements of the work of Eileen Gray and Evelyn Wyld, Sylvie Feron and René Baucher; designers whose talents were little known beyond their specialised field.

Yet they boasted intriguing lives and pioneering careers. Wyld was a British interior designer who settled in Paris before heading with Irish designer Gray to the Atlas region of Morocco to learn from local women how to weave and dye wool with natural colours. They later collaborated on rugs that were labelled ‘Designed by Eileen Gay at the workshop of Evelyn Wyld’. The pair were part of a creative circle of Sapphic Modernists in Paris during this fervent interwar period.

Meanwhile, the Belgian Feron-Baucher couple were responsible for some major French and Belgian interior design private and public projects, including the National Bank of Belgium, the Cercle Gaulois and the Hôtel Métropôle. Known for their furniture, lighting, textiles, children’s rooms and tapestries, they also ran an iconic store in Avenue Louise. This space also offers a reminder of Art Nouveau pioneer Victor Horta with an inset display of two of his upholstered chairs.

A final room presents a selection of fabrics from one of the rare designers who specialised in a single artistic discipline, Hélène Henry. The influential French textile designer created modern fabrics on hand looms shortly after World War One. She was at the forefront of a more modern and functional aesthetic as illustrated in the series of beautiful suspended fabrics.

Combining nuanced colours, geometric patterns and a subtle interplay of textures, the visionary and innovative designer influenced generations of designers. This space, with its small seating area, also invites contemplation and appreciation of Henry’s minimalist craftsmanship

The exhibition is part of Art Deco@home, a key element of Brussels’ Art Deco 2025 programme, in partnership with the Van Buuren Museum, the Boghossian Foundation, the Maison Autrique and the Art Deco Society.

All Over
Until 2 November
Horta Museum
Rue Américaine 25-27
Saint-Gilles

Photos: (main image) Anonymous ©The Van Hoe Collection/Thomas Lancz; L'Inhumaine ©FPA Classics; ©Hortamuseum/Thomas Lancz; Mme Van Goethem a Spa Rene Baucher ©Design Museum Brussels; ©Hortamuseum/Thomas Lancz; ©Hortamuseum/Thomas Lancz