Victor Arwas was born in Cairo, Egypt into a Sephardic Jewish family with deep diasporic roots, on 29 June 1937. The family left Cairo in 1956 during the rise of Egyptian nationalism and resettled in London. Arwas was educated in Cairo and New York and in 1969 established Editions Graphiques Gallery in London, becoming recognised as an expert in Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
Art dealer and gallerist Victor Arwas was born in Cairo, Egypt on 29 June 1937 into a Sephardic Jewish family with deep diasporic roots, tracing their exile back to the expulsions from Spain during the Inquisition. His father, also named Victor, fled Gaza during the First World War, as a British citizen threatened by the Ottoman authorities. He arrived in Alexandria aboard a British warship, where he quickly built a commercial empire centred on oil transport. Nicknamed ‘le roi de mazout’ (the king of fuel oil) he later moved the family to the UK during the rise of Egyptian nationalism under President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the following Suez Crisis. Arwas’s mother, Gisele, was a Viennese immigrant working in the National Bank of Egypt in Cairo and introduced her son to the visual arts and performance, including early experiences of Parisian galleries and the Folies Bergère. Arwas was educated at Victoria College, a British-style institution in Cairo, and later at New York University, before settling permanently in London in 1956. In the UK, Arwas’s father invested in film.
Arwas’s career was driven by a lifelong devotion to the graphic and decorative arts of the fin-de-siècle and interwar period. In 1969, he opened Editions Graphiques on at the corner of Clifford Street and Bond Street in central London in Mayfair - a gallery inspired by the French model, where sculpture, glass, furniture, prints and posters from the same era were presented in dialogue. In his gallery, visitors could see the lamps by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Émile Gallé illuminating bronze and ivory sculptures by Ferdinand Preiss and Demetre Chiparus, alongside sensual and enigmatic prints by Félicien Rops, Aubrey Beardsley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and James Tissot. Arwas’s aesthetic sensibility was both scholarly and sensuous: he championed the elegance of chryselephantine sculpture, the dark eroticism of Symbolist prints, and the decadent worldviews of figures such as Rops and Beardsley. Though known for his expertise in Art Nouveau and Art Deco, his interests ranged widely, from the polished surfaces of Lalique glass to the troubling and then controversial works of the German Surrealist, Hans Bellmer. Arwas also championed the English Brotherhood of Ruralists, including Peter Blake and Graham Ovenden, early in their careers, before they gained widespread recognition.
Throughout his career, Arwas curated or contributed to more than 30 exhibitions across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Japan, frequently lending works from his own extensive collection. He lent works to Ben Uri Gallery and Museum for the exhibitions, Rediscovering Wolmark in 2004 and Embracing the Exotic: Jacob Epstein & Dora Gordine in 2006, and to the Royal Academy of Arts in London for the exhibition, Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill in 2009. Editions Graphiques was not only a commercial gallery, but also a curatorial platform, staging early exhibitions of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, Leonor Fini, and David Hockney. Arwas also authored a substantial body of scholarship, producing landmark volumes, such as Art Deco Sculpture (1975), The Art of Glass: Art Nouveau to Art Deco (1996), and Art Nouveau: The French Aesthetic (2002). His writing combined rigorous research with flair, enlivened by a relish for anecdotes and an eye for detail. Arwas treated books and catalogues as objects in themselves, selecting illustrations with exacting care to create publications that were both intellectually precise and visually rich.
In later years, with the support of his wife and collaborator, Gretha, Arwas continued to run the gallery and advise museums and collectors, even as mobility became more difficult. Remembered as a modern-day aesthete, he embraced nocturnal habits, flamboyant dress and a conversational style full of wit, mischief and insight. He approached both art and life with humour and appetite and without separating the two, which made him a fixture of the London art scene. Victor Arwas died in London, England in 2010. The same year the gallery, by then known as the Victor Arwas Gallery closed, but its activities continue online and by appointment, continuing to lend to exhibitions, collaborating with museums and collectors, and upholding Arwas’s enduring vision. The collection includes works by artists such as Georges Barbier, Aubrey Beardsley, Hans Bellmer, Edward Burne-Jones, Georges de Feure, Raoul Dufy, Sir Jacob Epstein, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Félicien Rops, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, James Tissot, Kees van Dongen, Alphonse Mucha, and Henri Matisse, among others.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Victor Arwas]
Publications related to [Victor Arwas] in the Ben Uri Library