Berlin, 1930. In the garden of a villa, a sharply dressed man runs to rescue a beautiful woman, untying her from the semi-darkness of a shed. They embrace playfully, and kiss deeply.

It could be a scene from an old Hollywood movie, but it’s not. Instead, it comes from Le trésor de Tuy-Tuy-Katapa, a black and white amateur heist film written and directed by Henri-Pierre Roché, a celebrated French author, and Yeshwant Rao Holkar II - otherwise known as the Maharaja of Indore. He also stars in the little-known film, dressed in a crisp white shirt and cummerbund, alongside his wife, the Maharani Sanyogita Devi, who wears a jaunty hat and a string of chunky stones around her neck.

The film plays on a tiny screen at the exhibition Moderne Maharajah, un mécène des années 30 (A 1930s patron of the arts), currently showing at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. It brings together for the first time 500 rare photographs, pieces of furniture and fine objects that tell the story of the stylish life of a man considered one of the pioneers of modernism in India. 

The Maharaja was born in Indore on September 06, 1908, and succeeded his father to the Holkar throne at the age of 17. Educated at Oxford, he made several trips to Europe with the young Maharani. On these trips, the couple met and commissioned work from some of the biggest names in art and design of that time, including Man Ray and Constantin Brâncuși.

Man Ray’s delightfully candid photographs are one of the highlights of the exhibition in Paris, capturing the couple on their honeymoon in Cannes, all smiles and at ease with each other. The other highlights are the two striking pairs of portraits the Maharaja commissioned from the renowned French artist Bernard Boutet de Monvel, which are arranged within an enclosed circle of gauzy curtains that descend from the soaring ceiling of the museum’s main hall. Inside, no photographs are allowed, forcing the viewer to look directly, first into the strong stare of the Maharani, dressed in a lime-green sari, right hand on her hip. Then, the Maharaja, resplendent in white royal finery, a turban on his head. These portraits are positioned on either side of the second pair, creating a beguiling contrast: for now here is the Maharani in a cinched satin dress, a huge emerald at her throat, and the Maharaja in a coat and tails, all long lines and sharp angles.

The latter hung in the living room of the couple’s most memorable modernist project, the Manik Bagh palace in Indore, whose design and interiors form the other half of the exhibition’s focus. The Maharaja tapped the German architect Eckart Muthesius to design the palace, and the resulting Art Deco structure, completed in 1933, was a world away from the traditional royal Indian abode. Manik Bagh was where the couple lived their daily lives, surrounded by fine art and the objects they loved, brought home from Europe. The exhibition reveals the palace’s sleek, modern light fixtures and boxy chairs and cabinets. It also recreates the royal couple’s rooms, filled with futuristic leather and metal furnishings, and showcases how the modernist aesthetic even extended to their kitchen utensils. These were designed by the French silversmith Jean Puiforcat, each one marked with the sleek royal monogram envisioned by Puiforcat himself.

The absorbing exhibition comes to an end too soon, and stops short of detailing the rest of the royal couple’s story. The Maharani died just four years after Manik Bagh was completed, and the Maharaja married again twice before his own death in 1961. By the 1970s, two decades after Indore had joined the newly formed nation of India, the Manik Bagh palace had become a government office, its exotic European furnishings sold in auctions, and replaced by Godrej cupboards filled with files. 

Now, decades later, and thousands of kilometres away from Indore, the pieces of the royal couple’s pioneering project finally come together again. 

MODERNE MAHARAJAH, UN MÉCÈNE DES ANNÉES 1930 runs until January 12, 2020, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.