Often remembered as the “Ship of Light,” the Normandie was an eight-hundred passenger ship that only spent four years (1935-1939) crossing the North Atlantic from Le Havre to New York. Yet, its legacy as a maritime treasure of the Art Deco style remains strong. Created during a time when economic depression and political tension were being experienced on an international scale, ocean liners such as the Normandie were potent national symbols of modernity. As a flagship of French prestige, the Normandie was intended to establish French hegemony in matters of taste and technology. While the exterior structure of the ship demonstrated France’s technical prowess, the interior decoration was the main vehicle for conveying a distinct national style. Although the focus was on France’s national image, in true Art Deco fashion, the designers for the Normandie adopted a variety of cultural sources from the past in order to create a modern French present. Since the public rooms for First Class passengers required both luxury and grandeur, these interiors especially cited visual elements from various artistic high points of great civilizations from ancient Egypt to the reign of Louis XIV. In order to best understand how the interior design of the Normandie used the cultural past to promote French nationalism, one must observe the ship from the viewpoint of a First Class passenger spending an evening on board in the main public rooms. Bon Voyage!

A significant factor in the evolution of the ocean liner at the beginning of the twentieth century was the clientele, which drastically changed due to American immigration policy. After World War I, the United States passed the Dillingham Immigration Restriction Act (1917) that put a limit on the number of immigrants entering the country yearly. This seriously impacted the transatlantic shipping industry since one-third of its business during the early 1900’s derived from European émigrés. Consequently, a new type of passenger had to be found. Rather than émigrés sailing to America, the reverse occurred so that by 1930, eighty percent of ship passengers were American.[1] Although the majority of people traveling across the North Atlantic were American, ocean liners continued to assert their particular European national identity through interior decoration. For the interior of the Normandie, a virtual roll-call of French masters of the Deco idiom were commissioned to create maritime environments of haut décor.[2] The importance of the ocean liner as a symbol of national identity during the interwar years encouraged the French government to subsidize the construction of the Normandie from 1927 to 1935. Although privately owned by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (also known as the French Line), the Normandie was considered a national matter, and the government stipulated that the new ship “had to be not less than equal to the best foreign ship in commission or under construction.”[3] The Normandie was not just intended to create a profit; it was ordained to be an “ambassador” of French artistic and engineering talent.

The use of national heritage in designing a ship’s interior design was not a new concept for the French Line. Both of its earlier ships France of 1912 and Ile de France of 1925 were directly inspired by national design as exemplified in each of their Dining Rooms. French designers of the early twentieth century often sought to repeat designs of earlier eras when France had been the leader of taste.[4] While the aesthetics from the era of Louis XIV were employed for France, the more recent Art Deco look was used for Ile de France. In the surviving photograph of the Dining Room of France, the space is clearly a historicist revival of Louis XIV in which the influence of Versailles is evident with the white and gilded wood paneling with ornate pilasters and portraits of famous female figures like Princess de la Tour-du-Pin and Henrietta of England.[5] In contrast, Ile de France can be viewed as an extension of the 1925 International Exposition in Paris bringing Art Deco to the sea and onwards to New York.[6] (In fact, most of the designers for Ile de France had been exhibited in the Exposition.) The Dining Room in Ile de France promoted a modern aesthetic exemplified in the use of mirrored glass for the room’s paneling and geometric decoration in the seating for the dining chairs. The use of glass and the overall streamline effect of the Dining Room in Ile de France greatly influenced the major elements of the Normandie Dining Room. Yet, like France, the Normandie was unable to escape the influence the era of Louis XVI.

Interestingly, the same architect duo Pierre Patout and Henri Pacon worked on both the Dining Rooms of both Ile de France and Normandie. Instead of creating a replica of the Ile de France design for the Normandie, Patout and Pacon fused together the above mentioned modes of French design: the era of Louis XIV and the Deco style. Unlike the Dining Rooms for the previous ships, the Dining Room on the Normandie signified a shift in the way of thinking about designing a ship’s interior. Rather than attempting to directly translate interiors from ashore, designers began to create distinct looks for ocean liners, a le style paquebot.[7] Despite the originality and autonomy of the Normandie, its promoters and critics alike continued to use Versailles as a cultural yardstick. [8]  Even the ship’s publicity promoted the First Class Dining Room as an updated version of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Indeed, there is a palatial quality to the space which begins upon entering it from the Embarkation Hall towards the Dining Room staircase. The features of both the Embarkation Hall and the staircase resembled those of a chateau rather than a ship. Further, Patout’s and Pacon’s awareness of the ritual qualities associated with formal dinner were demonstrated in their layout of the staircase which provided a theatrical grand entrance into the room and functioned like a catwalk. [9] In a letter to his wife, passenger Harold Nicholson commented that the “the whole place is like a setting for a ballet…”[10] If Ile de France was an extension of the Exposition during the highpoint of Art Deco, than the Normandie was the style’s final stage, a last hurrah before the onset of World War II.

The theatrical quality of the Dining Room of the Normandie was mainly due to the experimental use of glass resulting in a lighting effect that had never before been seen on a vessel. Glass was not only a modern material but it was also flame retardant, a valued attribute as fire was a major concern for the ship’s owners who discouraged designers to use flammable materials such as wood. The Dining Room’s glass walls by Labouret were constructed with a layer of mirrored glass that was covered with another layer made of glass lonzenges interspersed with vertical corduroy strips of hammered glass.[11] This outer layer prevented the walls from having a reflective quality like the Hall of Mirrors; instead, the glass provided a shimmering effect further enhanced by illuminating the walls from within. Although fluorescent lighting was available at the time, Labouret chose to use lumiline bulbs creating an ambience of glowing warmth. The ubiquity of glass continued with the light fixtures provided by Lalique including two large chandeliers hanging above and twelve firepots placed between a series of tables. The chandeliers above were a traditional feature, but the firepots were novel appearing as if they were frozen water fountains. Although the firepots were a visual delight, they caused problems for the stewards and waiters who complained that they were unable to maneuver easily around the tables despite the fact that the Dining Room was the ship’s largest room at 305 feet long, 46 feet wide, and 28 feet high.[12] This problem of logistics highlights how the designers (and most likely the patrons) of the Dining Room were more concerned with the aesthetic impact of this luminous interior than they were with its functionality.

The Dining Room interior not only alluded to the Hall of Mirrors, but it also evoked an ancient Greek temple, particularly the Parthenon. Along with the room’s monumental scale, the most obvious reference to an ancient temple is the gilt bronze statue of La Paix sculpted by Louis Dejean.[13] Represented in a Grecian tunic and raising an olive branch, the female statue, the personification of peace, presided over the shimmering interior and from a distance Lalique’s chandelier appears almost as a pagan headdress .[14]  The harmonious ambience of the room itself provided a sense of security during a time of social unease. The sense of escapism in the space is further enhanced by the fact that there were no windows in the Dining Room, thus protecting the diners from societal ills, the dangers of the seas, and even the unsightliness of lower-class passengers. In addition, the lack of natural lighting allowed the designers to have total control over the spectacle as the lighting was unaltered by the passing of day into night. Furtherm the display of the paganistic statue La Paix was appropriate for the hedonistic nature of the era, and the abundance of glass conveyed a luxurious lifestyle, which was the self-image France wished to promote.

Another Normandie room with interior details creating interesting ties to past civilizations was the Smoking Room or Fumoir which was overseen by another pair of architects, Richard Bouwens and Roger Expert. In particular, the lacquer panels decorating its walls titled Man’s Games and Pleasures, created by Jean Dunand, contained non-Western sources of inspiration. The medium of lacquer was a process developed in imperial Japan and was then recently made popular in France by Dunand. The use of lacquer provided a new sensory experience for the Western passengers adding an exotic feel to their international travel and subtly conveying the worldliness of French society. The impact of the 1920’s excavations of Tutankhamen’s burial chambers on the Art Deco style also informed Dunand’s treatment of the panels. The gold leaf used in the lacquer and the pictograph-like quality of the imagery gave the impression that the panels were originally from an ancient tomb in Egypt instead of a Parisian studio.[15] For example, the stylization of ancient Egyptian art can be seen in the panels which composed the sliding partition where the hunter at the bottom right corner is depicted in an unnatural twisting of the body with his head facing the opposite direction of his body as his feet face towards the door. The foreign quality provided by Dunand’s wall panels provided for the Fumoir was even described by passenger Oliver Bernard as “a dream from Arabian nights.”[16] This adaptation of non-Western art into the wall decoration of the Fumoir indicates Dunand’s awareness in the 1930’s of the popularity of exoticism along with its sense of primitivism.

The Fumoir had traditionally been an exclusively male space, but for the Normandie, Bouwens and Expert took the radical step of no longer having the room functioned solely as a male domain. For instance, the Fumoir was used for teat-time services as shown in the photograph picturing the gaming tables converted for the afternoon tea with tablecloths and silverware. While within the partition there were two sets of glass doors to allow for access into the room when the Grand Salon and the Fumoir were divided, the sliding panels were more often open creating a large space for evening entertainment; the carpet in the Grand Salon was rolled up to produce a parquet floor for dancing, and the Fumoir was used an area for gaming. The Fumoir also functioned as a corridor since, without any division of doors or walls, it housed the staircase to the Café-Grill on the upper deck was within the Fumoir. These modern tropes of open provided flexibility of the rooms which well suited the needs of the ocean liner as space was limited. While the Fumoir lost its male exclusivity, the masculine connotations of the room remained as evidenced by the choice of solid and simple club chairs in brown Moroccan leather (a material less likely to retain the smell of smoke) and the use of square columns instead of round ones following the classical tradition for male denoted architecture.[17] Although the French Line chose to promote the Art Deco style in the First-Class interiors of the Normandie, the owner’s allowaed for its designers to challenge the conventional function of rooms and the use of open planning in public spaces demonstrated a willingness to use Modernist principles if not directly encouraging the aesthetic look as part of 1930’s France.

On the other side of Dunand’s sliding panels in the Fumoir, a lacquered relief surface mixed with silver and gold titled The Chariot of Aurora created by Jean Dunand and Jean Dupas in collaboration. The iconographic scheme of The Chariot of Aurora involves a mixture of references to the natural and navigational elements. For instance, in the centre of the composition, the rays of light which emanate from the sun included the cardinal points of a compass. Also, the passing of day is alluded to through the depiction of the goddess of dawn in the left hand corner and the goddess of evening in the right hand corner.[18] Similar to sixteenth and seventeenth century Roman villas where rooms for entertainment included frescoes depicting scenes from mythology, the Grand Salon was an environment of leisure which incorporated the classical gods albeit in a new medium: once again conveying French designers’ awareness of the past and ability to reinvent it for the modern era. Also, the paganism which was introduced to the La Paix statue in the Dining Room reoccurred as a decorative element in the Grand Salon contributing to the escapist quality of the space while the costliness of the execution of the panels in the medium of lacquer added to the overall decadence of the First Class lifestyle.

Numerous designers were involved in the creation of each major element of the First-Class interiors, including the creation of the chairs and carpet for the Grand Salon. Bouwens and Expert also oversaw the interior design of the Grand Salon and commissioned Rothschild to design the chairs that were then made by Baptistin Spade while Gaudissard designed the upholstery decoration, the fabric for which was then made by Aubusson. The reason for the French Line’s use of so many designers for one type of object was more pragmatic than it first may seem. The government, which was subsidizing the construction of Normandie, wished to sustain the skills of French artisans during a time of economic depression and prevent a rapid loss of knowledge of crafts skills; by encouraging the French Line to commission so many designers, the government hoped to maintain France’s craft industry. The combination of showcasing French design while supporting a declining craft industry also partly explains the commission of the world’s largest carpet for the Grand Salon. The Aubusson carpet was custom-made to fit the room by cutting the corners into crescent shapes to accommodate the ten pairs of columns thus integrating the carpet into both the décor and the architecture.[19] The monumental scale for an interior detail boldly stated the idealized image that image of 1930’s France was idealized as a nation of plenty. The sense of abundance in the Grand Salon can also be found in the red upholstery adorning the chairs and banquettes as well as the carpet, all of which used the popular Art Deco image of flower bouquets. Seven of the banquettes were centered with more of Lalique’s firepots or with large pewter urns by Maurice Daunat, in which the urns interestingly contained no floral arrangement. While the garden theme of the Grand Salon’s furnishing may not have been inspired by any particular past source, this traditional ornamentation most likely provided a sense of familiarity making it a welcoming space with a contemporary feel for the First-Class passengers (see fig.10).

Along with The Chariot of Aurora, the Grand Salon also contained glass murals created by Jean Dupas and Charles Champigneulle often called The History of Navigation. These glass mural which dominate the Grand Salon employed a technique known as verre églomisé, an ancient process which had been revived in eighteenth century France by Jean-Baptiste Glomy.[20] Like lacquer, verre églomisé was a labor-intensive process in which images were painted on the reverse of the glass thus adding to the array of handcraft techniques used in the luxurious First Class rooms. Although requested to design a scheme that represented the Normandy region, Dupas ignored his patron’s requirements for an allegorical scheme instead. The History of Navigation depicts ships from across the world and centuries: Egyptian dhows, Chinese junks, sixteenth century galleons, and nineteenth century paddle steamers.[21] Besides this eclectic mixture of ships, figures from classical mythology who are associated with the sea are also represented such as Aphrodite and Poseidon. This hybrid of cross-cultural sources exemplifies that the First Class public rooms of the Normandie were designed to reinterpret cultural precedents rather than revive them: or in other words, an Art Deco approach.

Despite all the glamour of the Normandie First Class interiors, the ship’s reality was far less sparkling. The Normandie never reached full occupancy during its four years of service, and consequently the sixty million dollar government subsidization was never repaid. One explanation for the lack of passengers may have been because the Normandie interiors were too bold as one American passenger commented that “there are those will consider them [the ship’s public rooms] too bizarre, too lacking in their functional simplicity…”[22] Even French critics, who were at first were enamored with the Normandie, began calling the ocean liner France’s “floating national debt.” However, it is important to remember that the main objective of the Normandie was to promote national prestige and encourage France’s craft industry with little concern about cost control.[23] Unfortunately, with the beginning of World War II in 1939, the Normandie was taken over by the United States Navy and while docked in New York Harbor, a mysterious fire occurred during renovations causing the vessel to be completely destroyed. Needless to say, there are few only a few surviving objects from the Normandie which appear in the contemporary ark market. What does survive from the Normandie is a fragmented mixture of photographs, film footage, and a few interior objects such as wall panelings. Of the objects which do exist today includes The Chariot of Aurora which is now exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the statue La Paix which now resides in Pinewood Cemetery in Long Island, New York, and the largest collection of Dupas glass panels are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection..

Although the Normandie had a short life as the luxury liner it was intended to be, it certainly made an international impact as a distinctly French ship that was innovative design both technologically and artistically. As demonstrated by the interior details of the First Class public rooms, a significant means of promoting French identity was the reinterpretation of the cultural past. In the instance of the First Class Dining Room, the glamour and luxury of the space was partly due to its allusions to both the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles (through the abundance of glass and lighting) and an ancient Greek temple like the Parthenon (through aspects such as the La Paix statue). The lacquer wall paneling of the Fumoir created an exotic atmosphere through non-Western references while the glass murals of the Grand Salon employed classical mythology in order to add grandeur to an already monumental space. Through the iconography employed, mediums used, and quality of hand craftsmanship, the First Class interiors made the Normandie not only “a ship of light” but also an Art Deco spectacle afloat.

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© Courtney Ahlstrom Christy

Ahlstrom Appraisals | Personal Property Appraisals and Art Consultations | Serving Atlanta & Southeast

[1] Fiona Walmsley. “Pragmatism and pluralism: the interior decoration of the Queen Mary,” Interior Design and Identity, ed. Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 155.

[2] John Pile. A History of Interior Design. (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), 352.

[3] Anne Wealleans, Anne. Designing Liners: a history of interior design afloat. (London: Routledge, 2006), 96. 

[4] Raymond Foulk. The extraordinary work of Süe et Mare : La Compagine des Arts Francais, Marie-Louis Süe (1875-1968) Andre Mare (1887-1932). (London : Foulk Lewis Collection, 1979), 5.

[5] Anne Wealleans, Anne. Designing Liners: a history of interior design afloat. (London: Routledge, 2006), 71.

[6] Philip Dawson. The Liner: Retrospective and Renaissance. (London: Conway, 2005), 83.

[7] John Malcolm Brinnin “The Decoration of Ocean Liners: Rules and Exceptions,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 15 (1990), 42.

[8] John Maxtone-Graham. Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Liner. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 86.

[9] John Maxtone-Graham. Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Liner. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 86.

[10] White, Ellen T. “A Race Among Nations: The Making of the Normandie Panels,” Carnegie Magazine 63, no.5 (Sept.-Oct. 1996), 30.

[11] John Maxtone-Graham. Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Liner. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 79.

[12] John Maxtone-Graham. Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Liner. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 78.

[13] For image of the statue La Paix, see Le paquebot “Normandie.” (Paris: L’Illustration, 1935), 27.

[14] John Maxtone-Graham. Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Liner. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 86.

[15] Félix Mancilhac. Jean Dunand: His Life and Works. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 146.

[16] Bernard Oliver. “Normandie,” Building 10, (Aug.1935), 314.

[17] John Maxtone-Graham. Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Liner. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 96.

[18] The star which the goddess of evening raises suggests sailors’ use of the North Star to navigate during the night.

[19] Francoise Siriex. The House of Leleu: Classic French Style For a Modern World 1920-1973. Trans. By Eric A. Bye. (Manchester: Hudson Hill Press, 2008), 296.

[20] John Maxtone-Graham. Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Liner. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 93.

[21] John Maxtone-Graham. Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Liner. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 93.

[22] “The floating palace from France,” American Architect 147 (Jul. 1935), 108.

[23] Philip Dawson. The Liner: Retrospective and Renaissance. (London: Conway, 2005), 321.