Marc du Plantier

Marc du Plantier was born in 1901 in Madagascar, then a French colonial territory. He initially specialized in mathematics and entered a preparatory course aimed at the Ecole Polytechnique, but did not complete that path. In 1922 he enrolled instead at the Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts de Paris to study architecture, while also taking painting lessons at the Academie Julian under Paul Albert Laurens.

He went on to build a career as a decorator and designer across furniture, lighting, tapestry, and interior ensembles, working through the Art Deco era and into the mid-century decades. His later career included an Artedecor venture in Mexico and a subsequent period in Los Angeles, before he returned to France around 1966. In 1973 the Sonnabend Gallery in New York presented an exhibition of his Art Deco dining room furniture. Gallery sources describe broader exhibition activity in France, the United States, and Mexico during his lifetime, though specific additional venues and years are not documented in the sources available for this profile.

Marc du Plantier died in 1975; one source (Gutknecht Gallery) specifies September 1975, though no source gives an exact day. A single secondary source (Galerie Patrick Fourtin) places his death in Paris, without a second source to corroborate it. He is also cataloged in some auction and valuation databases under the variant forms "Marc Duplantier" and "Du Plantier, Marc," all referring to the same individual.

Gallery and auction-house material consistently frames du Plantier as a significant figure in French interwar and mid-century decoration. Galerie Marcilhac describes him as an emblematic figure of 1940s French furniture design, and other specialist Art Deco dealers similarly position his work at the center of the period's decorative arts. No verbatim assessment from a named critic writing in a major art publication was located for this profile, so these characterizations should be read as market and gallery consensus rather than independent art criticism.

Du Plantier's auction market centers on furniture, with Artprice recording 398 public auction lots for the artist, the large majority in the furniture category. The highest price with a confirmed figure identified for this profile is USD 110,500, paid for a large dining table at Phillips New York in 2026; the exact sale date is not specified in the source reviewed. A separate source states that his auction record was set at Christie's in 2019 for a console, but gives no price, currency, or exact date, so that claim cannot be confirmed as higher or lower than the Phillips result. Market-tracking sites also cite realized prices as high as USD 768,000 for works in an "architecture and design" category and USD 175,637 for paintings, but the underlying work, auction house, and sale date for that figure could not be confirmed, so it is noted here only as an unverified upper bound. Valuation guides describe wide price bands by category: roughly EUR 2,000 to EUR 300,000 for signed furniture, EUR 2,000 to EUR 100,000 for lamps, and EUR 400 to EUR 20,000 for paintings, underscoring how segmented his market is by object type.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Marc du Plantier in the sources reviewed for this profile. In practice, authentication runs through specialist Art Deco dealers, principally Galerie Marcilhac, Galerie Matthieu Richard, and Gutknecht Gallery, all of which maintain artist pages and deal in his work or estate pieces. The documented auction record is thin and category-dependent: the highest price with a confirmed figure is a 2026 Phillips sale of a dining table for USD 110,500, alongside an unpriced claim of an earlier Christie's record and an unverified higher figure cited by market-tracking sites, so collectors should treat any single headline price with caution and confirm details directly with a specialist dealer before relying on it.