When Art Deco ruled the waves: designs by Jean Dupas for the SS Normandie

On 29 May 1935, the SS Normandie set sail on its maiden voyage, from Le Harve to Southampton, then across 3,400 miles of open Atlantic to New York. Averaging 30 knots, it docked in America in front of 100,000 cheering spectators after just four days, three hours and two minutes — a world record for any regular passenger liner, earning it the coveted ‘Blue Riband’.

The ship had been four years in the making, constructed in the world’s largest dry dock at a cost of 615 million francs, the equivalent of almost $1 billion today. It was 12 decks high and more than 1,000ft long, weighing 79,000 gross tons. With ample space for some 1,900 passengers, and nearly as many crew, the Normandie was the largest and most powerful liner ever built.

But this floating city wasn’t just a triumph of technology — it was also a monument to French art.

John Henri Dal Piaz, president of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, the SS Normandie’s builders, was determined to make the ship a champion of Paris’s fashionable contemporary culture. ‘Why, mesdames, would you, with your short skirts and bobbed hair, want to sit down in Louis XVI bergères?’ he asked rhetorically of the beau monde clientele.

As a result, every last detail of the liner’s dining hall, reading room, writing room, smoking room, winter garden, chapel, theatre, gym, tennis courts, and even the onboard kennel — as well as every single cabin — was individually designed in the Art Deco style. Polished surfaces, sleek lines and exotic materials captured the theatrical spirit of Art Deco, which had boomed in popularity following the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925.

Dal Piaz commissioned some of that show’s most feted designers, including Jean Dunand and René Lalique, to make dazzling bespoke artworks, with no expense spared. The soaring costs were later absorbed by the French government, which justified the outlay on the basis that the ship would serve as an emblem of French culture.

The pinnacle of the Normandie’s glamour was the Grand Salon — the gathering place for first-class passengers, who at various times included Ernest Hemingway, Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Laid out in a cross shape by architects Richard Bouwens van der Boijen and Roger-Henri Expert, and furnished under the supervision of the interior decorator Jean-Maurice Rothschild, it had a vaulted roof two-and-a-half decks high, with five floor-to-ceiling windows running the length of the port and starboard sides. The four internal corners of the room were covered with dazzling gold-glass murals that were 6.5 metres (21ft) high and and 15 metres (49ft) across. It was said that the salon was the modern-day equivalent of the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

The glass panels were the work of the artist and keen sailor Jean Dupas, whose painting Les Perruches had become a touchstone of high Art Deco when it was unveiled at the 1925 Paris exhibition.

Dupas chose to illustrate the history of navigation, depicting an eclectic mix of paddle steamers, junks, dhows and man-of-war ships sailing through crashing waves. Surrounding them are a plethora of sea serpents, dolphins, and stylised figures from Greek and Roman mythology, with flowing hair and sinuous, Mannerist limbs.

The project started life in his studio, where he sketched the initial designs for The Chariot of Poseidon, The Rape of Europa, The Chariot of Thetis and The Birth of Aphrodite. The illustrator George Barbier described the scene: ‘In his atelier, frames accumulate constantly against the walls; canvases cover canvases; the tables are heaped with sketches; loose leaves are pinned to the walls — sketches of some graceful movement, of some Virgilian landscape. One is forced to climb over the cartoons on which Dupas traces life-sized figures, or the large scrolls representing the columns for some temple yet unbuilt. Enough cannot be said in praise of these charming studies.’

Two of the designs Dupas made — for The Birth of Aphrodite and The Chariot of Thetis — are being offered by Christie’s Private Sales in Paris.

Each of the four scenes created by Dupas was worked up in size across three preparatory stages. The two works being offered represent the final and largest stage, measuring roughly one third of the size of the SS Normandie’s murals.

Both of the sketches narrowly escaped a devastating fire that destroyed much of Dupas’s work. A fragment of one of the smaller, earlier sketches, complete with scorch marks, sold at Christie’s in 2012 for $62,500. Another piece of a small sketch is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The final designs were transferred onto a set of 100 vertical panels of Saint-Gobain glass via a process called ‘verre églomisé’, which involved hand-painting the details in black and various pastel colours on the reverse of the plate. Then, with the assistance of the glazier Charles Champigneulle, layers of gold, silver and platinum leaf were delicately applied over the top. The technique is complex and laborious, and had never been attempted on a scheme of this size before.

However, Dupas — who preferred to work on a grand scale — dreamt of creating ‘an abundant, splendid effect’ unlike anything ever previously seen. The result, sketched at its unveiling by Vogue magazine’s fashion illustrator Jean Pagès, was a room flooded with brilliant, shimmering light.

After little more than four years of service, on 3 September 1939 — the same day on which France declared war on Germany — the SS Normandie was interned at Pier 88 in New York. Within a few months it was joined by the RMS Queen Mary and RMS Queen Elizabeth, and so the three largest liners in the world lay dormant, side by side.

In December 1941, a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved plans for the Normandie’s conversion to a troop ship, and on Christmas Eve dismantling of its interiors began.

On 9 February the following year, sparks from a welding torch ignited a pile of highly flammable life jackets that had been left in the Grand Salon. The ship’s fire suppression system had been deactivated, and its French inlets for hoses were incompatible with those used by the New York City firefighters. A blaze ripped through the room, then the entire ship, spreading plumes of acrid smoke across Manhattan.

By the following morning, several tons of water sprayed into the ship in order to quench the flames had frozen solid, causing it to list. For 18 months it lay on its side, half submerged in the Hudson River, before its charred hull was finally towed away for scrap.

Fortunately for Dupas, fire wasn’t able to destroy his work for a second time — all 400 of his panels had already been removed and dispersed by the time of the disaster.

In 1976, the main part of The Chariot of Poseidon was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by collectors Irwin R. and Linda Berman. Twenty-eight of its panels hung over the museum’s bar, before it closed in 2002 to make way for the expanded Greek and Roman galleries. Six years later, all 56 pieces in the museum’s collection were reunited for the first time in public since leaving the ship, forming the centrepiece of its show Masterpieces of Modern Design: Selections from the Collection.

One other panel is in the nearby collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Another eight were sold at Christie’s in 1981 to magazine impresario Malcolm Forbes. Gifted to his son as a surprise wedding present, they hung alongside Olympic gold medals and Fabergé eggs in the Forbes Galleries on 5th Avenue, before they were resold at auction for $1.39 million.

Several other panels have appeared at Christie’s over the years. In 2012, two panels sold for $578,500. A decade later, another pair sold for $176,400, while three individual pieces made $138,600, $214,200 and $302,400. Most recently, in 2023, three panels, including a corner piece, sold for $378,000.

Jean Dupas’s drawings The Birth of Aphrodite and The Chariot of Thetis are offered by Christie’s Private Sales. For additional information about these works please contact Agathe de Bazin: adebazin@christies.com; +33 1 40 76 72 54

The 12 June 2025 Design sale at Christie’s in New York will be on view 6-12 June