ART DECO CABINET, 1945

A tall two-door cabinet in pale sycamore, the façade composed entirely of a hand-laid straw marquetry (marqueterie de paille) in an elongated harlequin / lozenge pattern. Each diamond is laid up from split, flattened and polished rye straw, with consecutive lozenges oriented at opposing angles so that incident light catches the natural silica gloss of the straw and reads each cell as alternately luminous or shadowed — the shimmering moiré effect that defines the medium and that Groult, working with the specialist paillonneurs active in Paris in the 1920s, exploited more elegantly than almost any of his contemporaries. The doors meet at a recessed central stile and are framed by a serpentine, scalloped solid-sycamore border that softens the geometry of the marquetry field with a characteristically Groult curvilinear line.
The case is carried on four short cabriole legs ending in gilt-bronze sabots of stylised scroll form — period-correct soft-metal mounts, paired with two slender turned-bronze knobs at the meeting stile as the only hardware. The interior would originally have been fitted in sycamore or sycamore-and-cedar for a hanging program.
Straw marquetry has a specific and important place in 1920s French art décoratif: revived from the 18th-century paille tradition by Jean-Michel Frank in collaboration with the paillonneur Émile-Jacques Lampert, it was adopted in parallel by André Groult, Jean Dunand (in lacquered combinations), and the atelier of Léon Jallot. Of these, Groult is the only one who consistently combined straw marquetry with the soft, scalloped silhouettes and pale fruitwood frames seen here — Frank's straw cabinets are rectilinear and severe, Dunand's are lacquer-led, Jallot's lean rectilinear. The combination of paille harlequin field, serpentine sycamore framing, gilt-bronze sabots and short cabriole legs is, on stylistic grounds, a Groult signature.

Provenance: Private collection Paris

André Groult (1884–1966), trained in painting, became one of the central ensembliers of the French art décoratif movement of the 1910s–1930s and a key contributor to the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes — most famously the Chambre de Madame in the Pavillon d'un Ambassadeur Français with its shagreen chiffonier anthropomorphe. Alongside shagreen, Groult worked extensively in straw marquetry through the later 1920s, treating paille as a luxury surface on a par with parchment, ivory and exotic veneer. His vocabulary — pale fruitwood frames, curvilinear silhouettes, gilt-bronze sabots, restrained hardware — sits distinctly apart from the rectilinear school of Ruhlmann, Dominique and Leleu, and from the more austere Frank treatment of the same straw medium.