144 ARCHDIGEST.COM
“Do not accuse me of exaggerating when I tell
you, very simply, that my two hours at your house were among
the best that I have spent in Paris and France, even in Europe.”
So Yeshwant Holkar, dapper maharaja, wrote to Jacques
Doucet, haute-couture grandee, on October 22, 1929, shortly
before boarding a train to India. The latter had jettisoned
his ancien-régime antiques to become a pioneering Art Deco
patron, and the 21-year-old subcontinental aesthete had gone
to pay wide-eyed homage—just in time, too, because the
elderly Doucet died a few days later. “Those precious memo-
ries I will guard jealously and keep forever,” Holkar continued.
This was followed by a compliment (“Your comments and
tips have not been less valuable”) that indicates the maharaja
had discussed with Doucet his own forthcoming stylistic
transition: the transformation of a Jacobean-inflected bunga-
low in Indore into an avant-garde home.
A doe-eyed Oxford alumnus with a taste for fast cars and
jazz music, the 14th maharaja of Indore (now part of the state
of Madhya Pradesh) spent the long journey home savoring
the memory of Doucet’s decors: the extravagant Eileen Grey
and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann furnishings, the exquisite Pierre
Legrain book bindings, even Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Pablo
Picasso’s radical Cubist masterpiece. “The West has always been
inspired by the East,” says Olivier Gabet, director of the Musée des
Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where “Modern Maharajah: An Indian
Prince of the 1930s,” runs from September 26 to January 12, 2020.
“But this young guy was one of the very few to do the inverse.”
To remodel the bungalow known as Manik Bagh, or
Jeweled Garden, the maharaja and his wife, Sanyogita, hired
a friend, German architect Eckart Muthesius, who, at 25, was
barely older than his clients. “They look like babies,” Gabet
says of Man Ray’s portraits of the couple canoodling on their
honeymoon. Though the monarch had a well-trained eye,
“Manik Bagh was the project of a couple,” Gabet insists. “For
him, it was a big leap, trading a traditional Indian lifestyle
for European sophistication. It was an even bigger leap for
an Indian lady at the time.”
Monolithic without and what Gabet calls a “Utopian
modernist universe” within, the U-shape stucco building,
completed in 1932, that thrilled critics was actually a bit of a
fiction. For practical reasons, namely monsoons, Manik Bagh
had peaked roofs, but official images were retouched to pres-
ent a dramatic flat roofline. As for the Europhilic interiors,
also designed by Muthesius, The Miami Daily News praised
them as “colorful, modernistic, lovely.” More than 300 com-
missioned objects, from Puiforcat flatware and Muthesius
red-leather armchairs with integral reading lights to Bernard
Boutet de Monvel oil portraits of the young Holkars, will be
displayed in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in settings that
evoke their original settings, rounded out by home movies.
Many of the furnishings had been auctioned at Sotheby Parke
Bernet in 1980; Manik Bagh is now government offices.
“It was really a large, large house—six or seven bedrooms,
a banquet hall, a ballroom, a couple of sitting rooms, a nursery,
THE MAHARAJA’S OFFICE,
AS PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE
1970s; HANS AND WASSILI
LUCKHARDT CHAIRS, IVAN
DA SILVA BRUHNS CARPET.
THE ROYAL COUPLE,
PHOTOGRAPHED BY
ECKART MUTHESIUS,
THEIR ARCHITECT.
AN IVAN DA SILVA BRUHNS CARPET MADE FOR MANIK BAGH.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ROBERT DESCHARNES / © DESCHARNES & DESCHARNES SARL 2019; © 2019 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/VG BILD KUNST, BONN; © PHILLIPS AUCTIONEERS LIMITED; PHOTO BY PASCAL CADIOUS / © BERNARD BOUTET DE MONVEL / MUSÉE DE LA VILLE DE BOULOGNE-BILLANCOURT / ADAGP, PARIS, 2019
THE MAHARAJA, AS
PAINTED BY BERNARD
BOUTET DE MONVEL.
