CHESKA VALLOIS ART DECO DEITY

Cheska Vallois is just as I remembered her, when as a student I watched her from afar. And just as she had been described to me: whispering the great names in her husky, seductive voice, cigarette between her fingers, eyes fixed and exalted. I knew, of course, about her monomania for Art Deco: once in her home, I discovered an interior a little more eclectic than expected. Amid the furniture and objects of the twenties and thirties, there are African sculptures and tokens from prestigious friends: Karl Lagerfeld and Helmut Newton foremost, New Realist and the École de Nice, old friends from the Riviera and Monaco days. For it all begins in Monaco.

If you have ever heard of Cheska and Robert “Bob” Vallois, you surely know that they participated in the creation and then explosion of the Art Deco market. But perhaps you did not expect that they began as flea market dealers in Monaco and, even before that, their restaurant in Île-Rousse, Corsica, was among the hotspots of the early sixties. Their meeting was love at first sight in Oran, Algeria, during Bob’s military service, while Cheska was finishing high school. “I met him in a café. He said, ‘you’re really cute’ and I must really have been, because we have been together ever since. That was more than sixty years ago,” she remembers with a smile.

They got married quickly, moved to Le Havre. It rained cats and dogs; they didn’t really know what they were doing there until a friend suggested they move to Corsica, “a real paradise on earth at the time,” she recalls. They opened a restaurant, then a nightclub, camped out in the apartment upstairs, met Jean-Luc Godard “who was screaming on the beach because Karina wanted to leave him” and Jacques Perrin, who later claimed in an interview that Bob had introduced him to diving. In 1964, Cheska was pregnant and the couple returned to Monaco, near Bob’s parents. He was bored stiff working in the family business selling furniture to local hotels. One evening, walking home, he passed by a shop for rent: it would become the Vallois’ first store. They were not specialized, bought and sold everything, delighting Parisian antique dealers who came down to see them. Their friends were Arman, César, and the entire École de Nice. By 1970, it was Bob once again who set the tone. They would now move to Paris: he sensed something was about to happen.

Let’s come back to 2025, in François-Joseph Graf’s 19th-century salons, the decorator elaborates: “Bob is an entrepreneur at heart, a great businessman who also takes interest in different things, like African and contemporary art. He manages everything: he is the menhir, the dolmen. Cheska will shout out ‘Bob!’ He unfolds his six-foot-three frame, comes down from his upstairs office with a cigar in the corner of his mouth. She says: we must buy this object, Bob. ‘How much is it?’ he mutters, and then Cheska doesn’t know whether she has ten thousand or four billion in the bank, but she has the instinct.” This perfectly complementary couple, whose bond Graf describes as “a Tristan and Iseult kind of love, whose nature will never be questioned and which, whatever the strength of the wind, will always remain solid” thus found their path in 1971. They opened their first gallery near Les Halles. Then moved to rue de Seine.

Their first collectors were Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Hélène Rochas. They were ahead of trends, searching for the unknown, the beauty not yet discovered: Art Deco, completely forgotten, was among these. Other less-known enthusiasts would also point them in the right direction: lawyer Pierre Hebey, jeweler Michel Périnet, American Barry Friedman, collector of Ruhlmann, with whom they later opened their New York gallery. And Barlach Heuer, the first to step into their gallery just after Cheska had bought her first piece by Eileen Gray: the lacquered wood chaise longue named La Pirogue. At the time, the Irish born designer was unheard of. “Eileen Gray? No one knew that name; not us nor the other dealers. There were no books on Art Deco at the time; we had to do research directly in old interior design magazines and back then only the decorators were ever named,” she explains. “All Bob and I knew was that this piece was extraordinary, unlike any other we had seen. We bought it from a junk dealer for next to nothing. We had no money ourselves anyway!.” Barlach Heuer stopped in his tracks when he saw the Pirogue in their gallery. After inquiring on the price, he advised Cheska not to sell it for less than 8,000 francs. “These were francs, not euros, but back then there was no market! Art Deco didn’t exist anymore or not yet.” Two hours later, the collector and jeweler Michel Périnet walked in asking about the piece. “I told him: I don’t know. I know nothing. If you had come three hours earlier, it would have been 2,500 francs. But now, it’s 8,000. Barlach made me promise. He laughed and bought it. He didn’t know what he was buying either.”

That week, an American collector dining at Périnet’s apartment was startled when he saw the chair: Bob Walker, living in London, was close to Eileen Gray’s niece and always searching for her works. He alone knew her name, and that she lived in Paris. “Where did you buy that?” he choked, seeing the chair. “From these two young dealers in Les Halles.” replied the proud owner. Meanwhile, the junk dealer of the Pirogue had returned to the Vallois: in a cellar at the same address in the South of France, a dozen other pieces by the same hand were piled up. “It was really beginner’s luck,” Cheska now says. Bob Walker bought the lot and never left their side.

From the masterpieces of Art Deco that they patiently unearthed, dealing with the greatest decorators and collectors of recent decades, Cheska and Bob Vallois have kept only a few pieces. They are here, in their home, well sheltered in this large apartment, which feels more like a house. It, too, was a discovery. In 1985, when the couple were looking to settle near their Rue de Seine gallery, they came across this former factory that had once produced sinks. A kind of elongated warehouse. “The owner lived on the second floor,” Cheska recalls. “We told him very calmly that we were looking for a place to live and that our shop was just across the street. He showed us around; we immediately fell under the charm of this place where there was nothing, a ruin, everything to be done, with rails running from the door all the way to the back of the building. We immediately understood that we could make something out of it. He gave us the price, and we didn’t negotiate. He burst out laughing and told us: yes, you’re going to buy it from me because I like you. He had been refusing to sell it for years, but we didn’t know that.”

A full year of work followed, transforming the site into a livable residence, a patio at its center, and an upper level created from nothing. Little by little, the house filled up with the couple’s furniture, objects, and artworks. “But it is a house we live in,” Cheska insists. “Not a place to look at.” Not a gallery, one understands between the lines.

She guides us through the long living room, corridors, and nooks where stand, like so many silent witnesses, the pieces and objects that seem to represent milestones along their long journey. Here stands an Eileen Gray screen folding, undoubtedly one of Cheska’s favorite pieces. It is an original prototype that she will never sell, even though MoMA once came to see it, she tells us with a mischievous smile.

By the mid-1970s, just as the gallery was truly taking off, Cheska had only one idea in mind: meeting Eileen Gray. “For a year, I went to see her every week. We had long conversations and became very good friends. She was a brilliant woman, with a clear mind despite having just turned 93. She opened my eyes to so many things. I didn’t realize, when I met her, the influence she would have on me. I owe her the fact that I learned how to look. To know the difference between something good and something exceptional.” The grand dame of Art Deco explained to her that, during the war, she had to smash and burn her own furniture to heat herself. That she preferred her metalwork over her lacquer pieces. She went to the auction of the Jacques Doucet collection where, at Cheska’s suggestion, she cast a distracted glance at her lacquer furniture. “You weren’t wrong,” she told the young woman the next day. “They’re not bad, my pieces.”

In her innocence, as she calls it, Cheska Vallois visited her for the first time with an envelope of photographs: all the Eileen Gray furniture the young dealer had tracked down. Surprised, the designer allowed her to leave them, and Cheska asked her to sign them by hand. For memory? For certification value? “I don’t remember,” she admits. “Besides, I didn’t need it. When I came back, she showed me her hands and said: I signed one photo during the night. I can no longer use my hands because of the lacquer work. I then understood why so many lacquer artisans turned to artisans in Asia, who did not suffer allergic reactions or worse.”

As our conversation unfolds, the story of Cheska and Bob Vallois’s interior takes shape. “Every piece has a story,” one often reads in bad exhibition catalogues. Yet here, it’s true. The couple no longer buys much for their home. Only for the gallery do they continue to keep watch. François-Joseph Graf had warned us: Cheska is a dealer to the tips of her nails. Her tragedy? No longer being able to buy. Having created and scoured the Art Deco market to such an extent that it has become untouchable… and above all, unfindable, when it comes to the most beautiful pieces, now sleeping in private collections or in museums around the world. “At one time, I could buy every day. That’s over. And it’s my worst punishment: I wonder what I did to the good Lord for him to curse me like this” Cheska sighs, half-erious, half-joking. “The worst thing anyone could inflict on me is not being able to find things.” What’s more, the market no longer functions the same way. “Everything that was absolutely confidential has become visible, especially on the internet, and yet that was one of the most essential aspects of the trade. We are the last dinosaurs.”

Recently, she became obsessed with a group of glazed stoneware ceramics by Symbolist sculptor Jean Carriès. “Those frogs and rabbits kept me from breathing for two months,” she confides. But the bidding soared. She pauses, takes a drag from her cigarette. “The Wiener Werkstätte is the only thing I could have done, besides Art Deco. But I didn’t. It doesn’t happen in Paris.”

So there is no question of replacing the great passion of her life with another specialty. She even paid homage to it in what felt like a swan song, during the FAB fair last September, a lousy replacement for the late Biennale des Antiquaires. At the center of the Grand Palais stood Cheska, surrounded by her most beautiful finds. Nothing was for sale: they were simply displayed before our dazzled eyes, before returning to their discreet collections.

Art Deco has little left to prove: the 1990s and 2000s marked the peak of the market. Then came the auction of the Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent collection in 2006, since nicknamed ‘the sale of the century’, which totaled more than €373.9 million (fees included) in bidding. It was there that Cheska Vallois repurchased, for a client, Eileen Gray’s Dragon Chair, presented again later at FAB. “I had sold it for ten thousand francs back when we had the gallery on Rue Saint- Denis, in 1970. I bought it back for twenty-two million at the sale. I had an inexplicable feeling: that the circle had closed, that I had come full circle, that I had accompanied the piece to where it was meant to be. There you go, you’ve done it, you can’t do better.” Her statement suggests the idea that one’s work is done, tinged with the melancholy of time passing. “She had this very beautiful line, when asked why the chair could possibly have fetched such a price,” François-Joseph Graf chuckles. “She said: it’s the price of desire.”

What to do, then? Stop everything? The answer comes instantly: “I cannot live without my objects, without my work.” After all, there remains one unattainable item, asleep somewhere unknown for nearly a hundred years: a glass piano, the only one ever imagined by Pierre Legrain. A sort of Grail of Art Deco, nearly mythological, never yet awakened from its hidden slumber. All, including the Vallois, have hit a wall searching for it. A final, perfect quest.