Art Nouveau versus Art Deco? A Century in 32 Chairs — Horta Museum, Brussels

Art Nouveau and Art Deco are usually taught as a quarrel: the curve against the angle, the handmade against the machined, one generation refusing the one before it. The Horta Museum has set out to test that, and it does so with furniture. Art Nouveau versus Art Deco? 1850–1950: A Century in 32 Chairs runs in Victor Horta’s own house in Saint-Gilles from 25 June 2026 to 11 January 2027.

The exhibition opens with two chairs, one for each movement, and then works forward chronologically through thirty-two of them, accompanied by archival documents. The seats are by architects and designers of the first rank — from Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde to Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer — and they are grouped around the questions that actually cross the divide rather than the dates that separate it: how nature was stylised and then abstracted, what non-European sources were absorbed, and the principle of constructive honesty, by which the way a thing is made is allowed to decide what it looks like.

A chair is a good instrument for this. It has to carry a body, so it cannot hide behind ornament; and because it is made in series, it registers every change in materials and manufacture almost immediately. Seen in a row, the thirty-two make the century look less like a rupture and more like an argument conducted in the same language.

The museum has also given the argument to people still in training. Design students from La Cambre have produced chairs of their own, shown in Victor Horta’s workshop, where visitors can sit in them; one design, chosen by public vote, joins the exhibition.

Practical details

• When: 25 June 2026 to 11 January 2027
• Where: Horta Museum, Rue Américaine 27, 1060 Saint-Gilles, Brussels, Belgium — the architect’s own house and studio, on the UNESCO World Heritage list
• Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 14:00–17:30, Saturday and Sunday 11:00–17:30; closed Monday. Free entry on the first Sunday of the month
• Organised by: Horta Museum, with design students from La Cambre
• Tickets: hortamuseum.be

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition for readers following Art Nouveau and Art Deco in Brussels, where 2026 also marks the centenary year of Art Deco across the city.