L’Art déco, un « patrimoine de papier » ?

This contribution takes a fresh look at what remains of Art Deco in Marseille. Without ignoring the few buildings that still mark the urban landscape, its starting point is the paper heritage that bears witness to a fruitful period of creativity in the fields of architecture and the decorative arts. Dynamic port city open to international trade, Marseille experienced the exhilarating inter-war period with great intensity. It became a particularly fertile artistic hub, whose influence extended to the other side of the Mediterranean. Since then, the Art Deco works have often been seriously damaged or even disappeared altogether. Nevertheless, the archives of architects, artists and craftsmen, the specialist press and the photographic collections testify of the prolific activity of their creation time. Our analysis aims to show how this iconographic corpus allow a new appreciation of the architecture and decoration still existing and, above all, documents the today missing part of Marseille's Art Deco. More generally, it provides a better understanding of how a "paper heritage" is not only a primary source of knowledge about the artistic production of a particular period, but also a heritage that needs to be considered and enhanced.