Draft Screen, Gustave Louis Jaulmes (1873 - 1959), Gouache

Gustave Louis Jaulmes (Lausanne, 1873 – Paris, 1959)

Dramatic Poetry – Philosophical Poetry – Satirical Poetry – Lyric Poetry – Epic Poetry

Screen design in lacquer
Brush and India ink, gouache on Canson paper
48.5 × 66.5 cm
Captions written in pencil at the bottom of each panel of the screen
Signed in pencil, lower left

   The exhibition Jean Dupas & Co, scheduled at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux in 2026, may help advance the recognition of figurative painters who, during the interwar period, sought to move beyond academic conventions through undeniably innovative stylistic research, creating large-scale decorative works in harmony with the modernity of Art Deco. Gustave Jaulmes is one of these artists—indeed, a significant one—despite not having followed the traditional path of the Prix de Rome and the Villa Medici.

The son of a Protestant pastor, Jaulmes was thoroughly French, from a family originating in the Gard, despite being born in Lausanne—a fact that led to his mobilization during the First World War. Initially studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he assisted Victor Laloux on the construction of the Gare d’Orsay. He then turned to painting, training under Jean-Paul Laurens, and decided to become a decorative painter.

From 1903, for four years, he contributed to the decoration of the Villa Kérylos in Beaulieu-sur-Mer—an extraordinary reconstruction of an ancient Greek villa commissioned by the archaeologist Théodore Reinach. After the war, he was tasked, alongside Louis Süe and André Mare, with creating the decorations celebrating victory along the Champs-Élysées. He subsequently partnered with Süe and Mare to found the Compagnie des Arts Français. From then on, his name became associated with the major events that defined a new era in the decorative arts: the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, and the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.

Jaulmes excelled across all fields of the applied arts: monumental frescoes, such as those at the Palais de Chaillot in 1937; public and private decorative schemes, including for the ocean liner Île-de-France; theatre curtains; carpets and tapestries for the Gobelins; porcelain plate designs for Sèvres; printed textiles and furniture; as well as posters and book illustrations. In 1944, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

Likely dating from the interwar period or the immediate postwar years, this important design demonstrates the full modernity of Jaulmes’s graphic style—no longer indebted to academicism except in its technical mastery. Radically stylized, this screen project layers, against the contrast of a black background and golden figures, highly simplified bright red silhouettes. Arranged almost like collages, a skull and a theatrical mask—also in red—border on expressionism.