Gaston Suisse

Gaston Suisse was born in Paris on 1 December 1896. He trained at the Ecole nationale superieure des arts decoratifs in Paris, specializing in lacquer, after beginning as a largely self-taught artist.

His career advanced through the major Paris exhibitions and salons of the interwar years. He won the Grand Prix of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1930 and a gold medal from the same Salon in 1934, a gold medal at the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale for the lacquer work La Chasse, and a further gold medal at the 1937 Exposition internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie moderne for a lacquer panel titled Sea Swallows.

As the Art Deco style fell out of fashion after the war, his public profile receded, though galleries such as Boyer and Susse maintained standing exhibitions of his work into the early 1980s. Suisse died at his home in the 13th arrondissement of Paris on 7 March 1988, at the age of 91. Interest in his work has revived substantially since the 1990s through museum retrospectives in Orleans and Vernon and, more recently, through gallery exhibitions at Marcilhac in Paris (2013), Dumonteil in New York and Shanghai (2017 to 2018), Galerie Alexis Pentcheff in Marseille (2020), and a dedicated exhibition at the Musee Antoine Lecuyer in Saint-Quentin in 2025.

Suisse's work drew consistent praise during his lifetime in period journals including Art Vivant, Art et Decoration, and Le Figaro, and specialist historians continue to single out the technical precision of his animal subjects. Writing about his catalogue of work, the art historian Cecile Ritzenthaler has described his animal portraits as combining graphic perfection with a close, careful observation of each species, such that no specialist could fault his anatomical accuracy. Contemporary institutional attention, including the 2025 exhibition at the Musee Antoine Lecuyer, reflects a broader rediscovery of Art Deco lacquer work and of Suisse's place within it, alongside renewed gallery programming in Paris, New York, and Shanghai since the mid-2010s.

Suisse's market runs almost entirely through the decorative arts and design categories in France, centered on lacquer panels, screens, and furniture rather than works on paper. The best-documented result is a six-leaf lacquer screen (paravent a six feuilles en laque, circa 1930), sold at Christie's Paris on 22 March 2017 for EUR 123,000 including fees, a price a specialist market survey identifies as the artist's known auction record. A market-aggregator source separately cites a higher figure, roughly USD 285,000, for a different paravent said to have sold at Sotheby's Paris in 2014, but that claim lacks a confirmed lot number or exact sale date and is not treated here as the record. Other individually documented sales, such as a black and gold lacquered cabinet attributed to the artist that sold for roughly EUR 68,750 at Christie's Paris in 2016, sit well below that level, while a black lacquer box with stylized birds made about EUR 9,375 at Sotheby's Paris in 2021. General valuation guides cite ranges running as high as EUR 190,000 to 200,000 for lacquered furniture, but these figures describe a broad category rather than a specific, dated auction lot, so they should be treated as indicative rather than as a confirmed record.

Suisse's market is thin and inconsistently documented across sources, and reported prices for similar categories of work vary considerably depending on the dealer or database consulted. No catalogue raisonne has been identified, which places extra weight on signature, provenance, and expertise from specialist Art Deco dealers when evaluating a given panel, screen, or piece of furniture. Collectors should treat any single headline price, including the EUR 123,000 Christie's result, as one data point in a market that is still being reconstructed rather than as a stable benchmark.