Alexandre Léonard: The Man. The Art Deco. The Mystery.

You can’t talk about Art Deco in Shanghai without talking about the immensely talented Alexandre Léonard. One of the city’s leading French architects during the Art Deco age, Léonard designed villas, apartment houses, and civic buildings that would become landmarks of the former French Concession and define the Shanghai Art Deco style.

And then, at the end of World War II, he vanished. The mystery of his disappearance has never been solved, but his presence remains on the streets of Shanghai in the beautiful Art Deco architecture he left us.

The Early Years

Born in Paris in 1890, the young Léonard had a passion for design, and so in 1908, he entered the École des Beaux Arts. Renowned as Europe’s finest school of art and architecture, the training was grounded in the classical arts and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome and the curriculum was divided between architecture and painting & sculpture.