Paris, 1890 - Paris, 1959
Rose Adler was born in Paris on September 23, 1890, into a bourgeois family in the 17th arrondissement. It was surely her husband Léon Roger-Marx (from a family of collectors and himself passionate about the decorative arts) who opened the door to art for her. Her late husband's family motto "Nothing without art" embodied the convictions of the bookbinder and decorator, trained at the École du Comité des Dames de l'Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs (UCAD).
By the age of thirty, her bindings were already being exhibited and her name already known to members of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, which she joined in 1923. Rose Adler formulated her artistic postulate in these terms:
The modern bookbinder is truly modern in this: he is at the service of the text.
He wants to hear it and make it heard.
He embraces it, he exalts it.
Yet he refuses to describe, because any description would be an illustration...
Enthralled by this harmonious, innovative vision, couturier Jacques Doucet, decorator Pierre Legrain, architect Pierre Chareau and poets Pierre André Benoit and René Char were her closest friends and a great support. It was with them that she exalted the elegance and modernity of her bindings, combining inlays of semi-precious stones with "edge-to-edge" lining. Her multi-faceted innovations initially fueled the Art Deco movement, before overtaking it to join the modernist movement, whose codes were more in tune with her aesthetic.