MAISON PHILIPPE MONTAGNE — EDITORIAL The Black Land and the Golden Age: Art Deco and Its Egyptian Roots
There is a particular kind of building you learn to recognise once you have seen enough of them — a cinema façade in Brixton, an apartment block in Portland, a jewellery counter at Cartier — where the geometry suddenly tightens, the palette turns to gold and lapis and turquoise, and a lotus capital or a winged sun disc appears where you would least expect it, holding up a doorway in 1920s Paris or 1930s Los Angeles as though it had always belonged there. It had not, of course. It had travelled a very long way, and it had taken more than a century to arrive.
The Land the Egyptians Called Black
The ancient Egyptians did not call their country Egypt. That name came later, filtered through Greek. They called it Kemet — the Black Land — a name drawn not from any darkness of spirit but from the rich, dark silt the Nile deposited each year along its banks, the fertile soil that made the entire civilisation possible. It was a name of gratitude, really, distinguishing the black land of the river valley from the deshret, the red land of the surrounding desert. Everything the Egyptians built, they built in negotiation with that river and that soil. Their pyramids were not tombs in the ordinary sense, though bodies were placed within them. They were instruments — devices, almost — engineered to help a king's spirit complete its journey. The Egyptians believed the pharaoh occupied a position between the human and the divine, and that upon death he became Osiris, lord of the dead, while his successor became Horus, protector of the sun god Ra. The pyramid's smooth, precisely angled sides were built to evoke the descending rays of the sun, a ramp of stone light along which the king's soul could ascend to join Ra in the sky.
The great funerary complex at Giza, built for Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure across the twenty-sixth century BCE, remains the only one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world still standing — itself a kind of quiet rebuke to every style that has claimed the word "timeless" since.
Napoleon's Scholars and the First Wave of Egyptomania
The transmission of that ancient grammar into Western design did not begin in the 1920s. It began, improbably, with an army. When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought with him more than soldiers — he brought a scientific commission of over five hundred scholars, artists, and engineers, tasked with documenting everything they found. The result, published in instalments between 1809 and 1826 as the twenty-volume Description de l'Égypte, was the first systematic visual record of Egyptian monuments that Europe had ever possessed. Its illustrations of temples, hieroglyphs, and pyramids sparked what historians now call the first wave of Egyptomania — sofas grew sphinx legs, tea sets acquired painted pyramids, and Egyptian motifs entered European decorative arts for the first time as a considered style rather than a curiosity.
The place de la Concorde in Paris features the obelisk of Luxor in its centre, gifted by Egypt to France after the napoleonic wars.
A second wave followed later in the nineteenth century, as British, French, and German archaeologists — among them Theodore Davis, who excavated extensively in the Valley of the Kings between 1905 and 1914 — brought steady new discoveries back to European audiences. But it was the third wave, arriving on the fourth of November 1922, that changed everything permanently.
Yes, Wonderful Things
On that date, the British archaeologist Howard Carter, funded by Lord Carnarvon, found the steps leading down to the buried entrance of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
When Carnarvon, peering through a small breach in the doorway, asked whether Carter could see anything, Carter's reply became one of the most quoted sentences in the history of archaeology: "Yes, wonderful things." The tomb, remarkably undisturbed for over three thousand years, yielded more than five thousand objects of extraordinary craftsmanship — the solid gold funerary mask, jewelled pectorals, gilded shrines — and the discovery was covered by newspapers around the world with an intensity that had no precedent.
Egyptomania, this time, was total and immediate. Architects and designers absorbed the moment almost instantly. In London, the architects Andrews and Peascod, best known for their cinema work, built the Reliance Arcade in Brixton (1925–1926), its buff ceramic façade rendered in strict Art Deco geometry and finished in the bright blue, red, yellow and green palette lifted directly from Egyptian temple painting. Greater London house formerly a tobacco factory.
Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, designed by Meyer & Holler, had in fact opened in October 1922 — weeks before Carter's discovery — but its fortunes, and the entire genre of the Egyptian-themed movie palace it inaugurated, were sealed by what followed. In London's West End, the Hoover Building (1931–1932), designed by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners, remains one of the most celebrated Egyptian-influenced Art Deco factories anywhere, its façade a disciplined arrangement of cavetto cornices, sunburst motifs, and stepped geometric ornament borrowed directly from temple architecture along the Nile. In Portland, Oregon, the architect Elmer Feig gave the Blackstone Apartments (1930) pharaohs on the first and fourth floors and winged griffins along the roofline. Cartier, for its part, produced an Egyptian-motif clock in 1927 that has become one of the defining objects of the entire Art Deco jewellery vernacular — a small, exact, gleaming distillation of an entire civilisation's visual language.
What the Temple Taught the Tower
The formal vocabulary the architects borrowed was remarkably specific, and remarkably durable: the cavetto cornice, curving outward at the top of a wall in a gesture derived directly from Egyptian temple architecture; the papyrus and lotus capital, translated into stylised column heads; the sunburst, radiating outward in perfect symmetry; the scarab, the cartouche, the winged sun disc, each carrying centuries of accumulated meaning into a doorway on Sunset Boulevard or a shopfront in Brixton. What Art Deco designers understood — correctly, and with more discernment than they are sometimes given credit for — was that this vocabulary was not merely exotic. It was structural. Egyptian architecture had already solved, thousands of years earlier, the problem that occupied every serious modern designer of the 1920s: how to make monumental geometry feel weightless, how to let symmetry carry emotional force without becoming static, how to build something that looked as though it could last forever, because in Egypt's case, it very nearly had. There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from borrowing forms that have already survived three thousand years of scrutiny. The pyramid did not need Art Deco to prove its authority. Art Deco needed the pyramid to prove its own.
The Grammar That Outlives Its Makers
What Egypt gave to Art Deco, in the end, was not a decorative theme to be applied and then discarded with the fashions of the decade. It was a demonstration — the clearest one available anywhere in the ancient world — that geometric precision, pursued with total conviction, produces objects that time simply declines to erode. Kemet's builders were not decorating. They were solving the oldest problem in design: how to make something that means exactly what it says, and keeps meaning it, indefinitely.
That same conviction, quietly and without insistence, runs through the philosophy of Maison Philippe Montagne.
The pursuit of beauty through Art Deco has always meant reaching back toward forms that have already proven their endurance — and few forms have proven it as completely, or for as long, as the ones that first rose along the banks of the Nile.
Sources and further Reading:
Description de l'Égypte. Commission des Sciences et des Arts d'Égypte, Paris, 1809–1826.
"Art Deco's Global Influences." vam.ac.uk.
"Art Deco & Egyptian Revival." visitahc.org.
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