Jean Fouquet (1899-1984) was a French modernist jeweller working in Paris, the third generation of the Maison Georges Fouquet jewellery dynasty. His work, executed principally between the late 1920s and the 1960s, places him among the most important figures of the French Art Déco modernist movement alongside Raymond Templier and Jean Després, with whom he shared an austere geometric idiom that broke decisively with the historicism of the family firm in which he had trained.

Family Background

Jean Fouquet was the son of Georges Fouquet, the celebrated Art Nouveau jeweller who had collaborated with Alphonse Mucha and others, and the grandson of Alphonse Fouquet, who had founded the family firm in 1860. The Maison Georges Fouquet, with its showroom on the rue Royale in Paris, was already an established Place Vendôme-tier haute joaillerie operation by the time Jean Fouquet entered the firm in 1919 after his service in the First World War.

Style and Vocabulary

Where his father had worked in the curvilinear naturalism of Art Nouveau, Jean Fouquet pursued a strict modernist geometric vocabulary from the early 1920s. His work is characterised by clean unadorned planes, large blocks of uniform colour rendered in single coloured stones such as onyx, lapis, coral or jade, contrasting use of yellow and white gold or platinum, and the deliberate suppression of ornamental detail. Diamond pavé, where used, appears as a planar element rather than as decorative trim. The geometric vocabulary is more austere than that of either Després or Templier and resembles in its discipline the contemporary architecture of Le Corbusier and the painting of Fernand Léger.

Career and Exhibitions

Jean Fouquet exhibited at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes alongside the family firm and at subsequent international exhibitions. He was associated with the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM), the modernist French design movement founded in 1929 that included Robert Mallet-Stevens, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and others, and he wrote on the principles of modernist jewellery in published essays through the 1930s.

The Maison Georges Fouquet ceased operation as a retail house in 1936, but Jean Fouquet continued to produce jewellery on his own account thereafter and well into the post-war period, with extensions of his earlier vocabulary into the post-war modernist idiom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Reception and Legacy

Jean Fouquet's work has remained a fixed reference in the modernist French Art Déco canon. Major holdings are at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and at the Musée Galliera, and pieces appear at Christie's, Sotheby's and Drouot with strong results in the Art Déco market. He published extensively on jewellery design principles, and his austere modernist vocabulary has been an influential reference for subsequent generations of designer jewellers committed to geometric form rather than ornament.