Child's chair from the Normandie Oceanliner

This chair was created by Marc Simon and Jacqueline Duché for the first-class children's playroom on the S.S. Normandie, an Art Deco masterpiece that was furnished with luxurious designs inspired by work shown at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The pink leather upholstered seat and back are supported by two inverted U-shaped wood structures that form both the legs and the arms of the chair. Each support is painted white and embellished with black lines on the side facing outward to create a stylized image of a horse with its nose to the ground. Each wood arm is surmounted with a pink leather upholstered piece that mimics a saddle. The strict geometry of the seat and back reflect early modernist principles of geometry and reductive form, while the supports inject a whimsical note presaging postmodernism.The chair demonstrates the range in Art Deco styles, from anamorphic decoration to minimalism.