Maxime Old

Maxime Old was born on 13 December 1910 in Maisons-Alfort, a suburb of Paris, into a family of cabinetmakers. He attended local primary and secondary schools before enrolling at age fourteen at the Ecole Boulle in Paris, the city's leading school of applied and decorative arts. He spent four years there and graduated in 1928 at the top of his class. That same year he joined the design atelier of Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, one of the defining names of French Art Deco, where he worked as a draftsman and designer until 1934.

Old then established his own practice, developing a body of furniture and interior work that moved away from Ruhlmann's ornamental Art Deco toward a more rational, structurally clear postwar modernism. He exhibited widely through the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs from 1935 onward, and through the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Arts Menagers into the 1960s. His international profile grew through appearances at the 1939 to 1940 New York World's Fair and exhibitions in Copenhagen, Caracas, and New York in the early 1950s. In 1958 he directed the interior design of the French hotel trade pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair, work that received the fair's Grand Prix.

Alongside his design practice, Old held teaching posts at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs and other Paris design schools, and served as vice president of the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs. He closed the family workshop in 1969 but continued designing until his death. He died in 1991 in Paris. His son, Olivier Old, has since maintained the family archive and overseen questions of authentication and reproduction.

Old is treated in design literature as a pivotal transitional figure, someone who absorbed Ruhlmann's discipline and craftsmanship and carried it into a cooler, more rational postwar vocabulary associated with Bauhaus thinking. Yves Badetz, chief curator of decorative arts at the Musee d'Orsay, has described Old's work as fusing the rational values of the Bauhaus with Ruhlmann's demand for perfection, framing him as a designer whose refined forms anticipated later decades. That reading has been reinforced by the major 2025 to 2026 retrospective at the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, "Maxime Old, homme d'interieurs," which surveyed roughly a hundred pieces and drew coverage in Le Monde and Wallpaper as a reassertion of his place among twentieth-century French designers, alongside renewed gallery attention from dealers such as Maison Gerard and Jacques Lacoste.

Maxime Old's auction footprint is small and specialized compared to the fine-art names Masterworks typically covers. The highest price documented in current research is EUR 35,000, paid for the mirror Miroir Etoile at a Sotheby's sale in 2015, according to the French valuation site MR Expert; no exact sale date or location, and no higher subsequent result, could be confirmed from available sources. Retail dealer listings for his furniture, on platforms such as 1stDibs, run considerably higher, into the tens of thousands of dollars for individual pieces, but these are asking prices rather than auction results and should not be read as market benchmarks. There is no catalogue raisonne and no visible pattern of repeat sales at auction, so any single result should be treated as a data point rather than a trend line.

This is a niche, design-market name rather than a deep, liquid auction category. Only one specific auction result, EUR 35,000 for Miroir Etoile at Sotheby's in 2015, could be confirmed in current research, and there is no catalogue raisonne to anchor attribution. The specialist authentication service Docantic has publicly documented pieces misattributed to Old, including at least one lot offered at Sotheby's, so provenance and, where possible, confirmation through the family archive matter more here than for artists with an established repeat-sale history. The 2025 to 2026 Rouen retrospective and renewed gallery interest may support demand going forward, but collectors should treat any single sale result as thinly supported rather than as evidence of a broad, established price trend.