Djo-Bourgeois

Georges Bourgeois, who worked under the name Djo-Bourgeois (sometimes written Djo Bourgeois), was born on 18 April 1898 in Bezons, France. From 1914 to 1922 he studied architecture at the Ecole speciale d'architecture in Paris, training under Robert Mallet-Stevens, with his studies interrupted by military service in the First World War before he returned to complete them.

From 1922 he worked at Studium Louvre, the design studio of the Grands Magasins du Louvre department store, designing furniture and interiors. He first exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1922 and became a regular exhibitor at the Salons of the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs from 1923. In 1925 he designed an office for Studium Louvre shown at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the exposition that gave Art Deco its name. A bedroom installation he presented at the 1926 SAD Salon was widely praised for its harmonious integration of architecture and furnishings, and he became known for an early embrace of aluminum and other modern materials in interior design.

He worked closely with his wife, Elise Djo-Bourgeois, a textile and pattern designer with whom he collaborated under the same joint professional name; her own career and dates (1894 to 1986) are documented separately from his. Djo-Bourgeois died on 31 March 1937 in Paris while still working on a project tied to that year's Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne; the work was completed after his death by friends and colleagues and shown with the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs at the exposition.

Djo-Bourgeois is remembered within Art Deco and French modernist design history primarily through institutional preservation rather than a continuous critical literature. His 1926 bedroom for the SAD Salon drew strong contemporary praise for uniting architecture and furniture into a single design language, though the surviving accounts of that praise are unsigned period summaries rather than quotations that can be attributed to a named critic in a specific outlet. His archive, the Fonds Djo-Bourgeois, is held by the Centre Pompidou's Bibliotheque Kandinsky, with a related body of drawings and photographs at the Bibliotheque Forney, and he is listed in reference resources including the RKD artists database. Interest in the joint Djo-Bourgeois practice has been renewed in recent years through the textile house Pierre Frey's reissue of Elise Djo-Bourgeois's 1920s textile designs, which has drawn design press attention back to the couple's collaborative work.

No verified all-time auction record for Djo-Bourgeois could be confirmed as of 2026-07-16. The public record includes retail and dealer listings for furniture attributed to him, including pieces offered through design dealers at prices roughly in the eleven to twenty-four thousand US dollar range, and at least one Christie's lot for a circa-1930 circular table attributed to him, but none of these sources supplies a documented hammer price, sale date, and venue sufficient to name a record sale. Collectors should treat his auction history as thin and largely undocumented in accessible databases, rather than assume a specific record price.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Djo-Bourgeois, and no gallery or estate is known to currently represent his work; attribution rests on the Centre Pompidou and Bibliotheque Forney archives and on documented Salon exhibition history. Buyers should also take care to distinguish Georges Djo-Bourgeois, the architect-decorator whose furniture and interiors occasionally appear at design-focused sales, from his wife and collaborator Elise Djo-Bourgeois, a textile designer who worked under the same joint name and whose patterns are today reissued commercially by Pierre Frey. Because no confirmed auction record could be established from available sources, any pricing claim for this artist should be treated with caution until verified against a specific, dated sale.