Paul Iribe

Paul Iribe was born Paul Iribarnegaray on 8 June 1883 in Angouleme, France, and studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the College Rollin between 1908 and 1910. He began publishing illustrations while still a teenager, contributing to the satirical weekly L'Assiette au Beurre around 1900 and later to Le Rire, Le Sourire, and La Baionnette. In 1906 he co-founded the satirical journal Le Temoin.

His fashion work brought him wider recognition. In 1908 he produced Les Robes de Paul Poiret racontees par Paul Iribe, an illustrated portfolio commissioned by the couturier Paul Poiret that helped establish a new, freer style of fashion drawing. He followed it in 1911 with a portfolio for Jeanne Paquin, and from 1912 he was a leading contributor to the Gazette du Bon Ton, the influential fashion journal founded by Lucien Vogel. Alongside this graphic work he ran his own Paris studio designing furniture, textiles, jewelry, and interiors.

In 1919 Iribe traveled to Hollywood, where director Cecil B. DeMille recruited him for design work, and he served as art director on DeMille's The Ten Commandments in 1923. He returned to Paris and relaunched Le Temoin as a political satire journal in 1933. From 1931 until his death he was in a relationship with the couturier Coco Chanel. On 21 September 1935, Iribe collapsed and died, reportedly of a heart attack suffered while playing tennis, at La Pausa, Chanel's villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera.

Iribe is credited by design historians as a founding figure of French Art Deco graphic and decorative style, someone who brought the loose, dynamic drawing of fashion illustration into dialogue with jewelry, furniture, and interior design. His collaborations with Paul Poiret and Jeanne Paquin, and his work for the Gazette du Bon Ton, are consistently cited as turning points in early twentieth-century fashion illustration, showing garments worn by active women rather than posed mannequins. His later career, spanning Hollywood art direction for Cecil B. DeMille and a return to political satire with the relaunched Le Temoin, is treated by biographers as evidence of an unusually wide-ranging design sensibility, though it has left him without the kind of monographic museum retrospectives that anchor the reputations of some contemporaries.

Iribe's market is small and concentrated in decorative arts and works on paper rather than in a deep run of paintings. Price-guide data puts typical results for his furniture in a range of roughly hundreds of euros to about 200,000 euros, prints and engravings in the low hundreds to about 1,000 euros, and drawings and watercolors from about 80 to 2,000 euros. Above that range, price database MutualArt records his all-time auction high as USD 1,083,854 for a sculpture. The work's title, auction house, sale location, and exact date of that top result are not disclosed in publicly available records.

There is no catalogue raisonne and no gallery or estate currently representing Iribe's work, so authentication and provenance research depend on auction house specialist departments and comparison against his documented commissions. His market is thin and split between modestly priced works on paper and a small number of exceptional decorative-arts results, which means the headline auction figure is not representative of what most works by him actually sell for. Collectors should treat any single high result, including the reported USD 1,083,854 auction high, with care until fuller sale details are independently confirmed.