Jean-Charles Moreux

Architect, decorator, landscape designer, painter and scholar, Jean-Charles Moreux was among the most original creative spirits of twentieth-century France. Rejecting the uniformity of the machine age, he forged a poetic neoclassicism of his own, drawing freely on Palladio, Ledoux and the baroque, and infusing it with a sense of wonder and surprise that brought him close to the Surrealists. Alongside Emilio Terry, André Arbus and Louis Süe, he stands as one of the great reinventors of the French classical tradition, and his rare furniture and objects, prized by the most discerning collectors, remain among the most refined of their time.

Jean-Charles Moreux was born in 1889 in Saône-et-Loire, in Burgundy. He first trained as a civil engineer at the École spéciale des travaux publics before turning to architecture, entering the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1910. There he formed a lasting friendship with André Lurçat, under whose influence he was drawn for a time to purist architecture, and with the brothers André and Paul Véra, who introduced him to the art of the garden. In 1924 he began his career with purist-inspired model houses, and exhibited his first furniture at the Salon d'Automne. From 1923 he had been designing strongly architectural pieces, conceived according to regulating lines, which he rarely signed.

While he studied low-cost housing and standard furniture, Moreux also worked for some of the most enlightened patrons of the age, among them the couturier Jacques Doucet, Baron Robert de Rothschild and the Vicomte Charles de Noailles. For Rothschild he built a hôtel particulier on the avenue Marigny in 1927-28, and for the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska an auditorium at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.

The year 1926 marked a turning point. He met Bolette Natanson, the daughter of Alexandre Natanson of La Revue blanche, who introduced him to a circle of writers, artists and musicians. They travelled and worked together, and on returning from a journey through Italy with her, Moreux began to weave references to Roman antiquity, the Renaissance and the baroque into his work. Both passionate about natural history, they created astonishing compositions from butterflies, shells and stuffed birds, opening, in the words of the critic Marcel Zahar, the doors of the marvellous. In 1930 they founded the gallery Les Cadres at 174 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with a series of themed exhibitions devoted to naturalist variations, bird cages, plants, butterflies and ice. Its clients included Bernard Reichenbach, the Princesse de Polignac, the painter André Dunoyer de Segonzac and the couturier Raphaël.

From 1928, disillusioned with the formal poverty of the avant-garde, Moreux returned to the classical traditions of Italy and France and proclaimed the birth of a modern neoclassical school. He applied it chiefly to private commissions, among them the hôtel particulier of Bernard Reichenbach in Paris (1929-1932) and the house of Jacques Demachy near Chambourcy (1935-1937). The same year he joined the Union des Artistes Modernes, in 1930, he nonetheless kept his distance from architectural circles, preferring the company of artists and thinkers.

His gardens were the natural extension of his architecture. In the many urban gardens he designed, alone or with the Véra brothers, he favoured geometric composition, restraint in planting and illusions of perspective created with mirrors. The Jardin des Gobelins in Paris, today the square René-Le-Gall, unites baroque elements with classical lines in a powerful whole. Bolette Natanson died in 1936, the year Moreux became sub-editor of the review L'Amour de l'Art. He designed the Martinique Pavilion at the Exposition internationale of 1937 and the gardens of the UAM pavilion, and exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1939. After the war he laid out the gardens of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, in 1947-48.

Appointed chief architect of the Bâtiments civils et Palais nationaux, Moreux was entrusted with the refurbishment of the painting galleries of the Louvre, notably the Galerie Médicis, and took part in work at the Château de Rambouillet. Painter, museographer, historian and astronomer as well as architect, he died in Paris in 1956, leaving an œuvre as singular as it was cultivated, in which classical order and the poetry of the marvellous were never far apart.