Art Deco

ART DECO was a reaction. A reaction to the misery of the Great War, and the angry art it spawned. The Jazz Age, the 1920s, was about optimism (‘cocktails and laughter’ Noël Coward called it). A streamlined world, celebrating luxury, elegance; flashy, vulgar even. The key moment for Art Deco, and from which it took its name, was the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Paris, 1925) held to ‘return decorative art to the important place it occupied in the past’ (Francis Jourdain). Known then as ‘Style Moderne’, it was soon celebrated in skyscrapers, cinemas, trains, cars and pretty well everything in the house from taps to radios. It was ensemble design, ‘total’ design. Hitherto hidden rooms like bathrooms and kitchens became ‘features’. Light fittings were sculptural. Shapes were bold, angular. Silver, grey and primary colours dominate; and symbols with arcs and radiating lines – the sunburst, zig-zag and fountain. The results were exuberant, and eccentric. Clarice Cliff, the potter, named her range of vibrant tableware (aptly) Bizarre. ‘Colour seems to radiate happiness and the spirit of modern life.’

The ceramicist Susie Cooper’s motto was ‘elegance combined with utility’. If self-consciously artsy, Deco – mostly – married form and function. [Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair was easy on the eye, but not the back.] Painting and graphic design adopted a graceful variant of Cubism. Art Deco was not a movement, or a crusade with a manifesto, like Dada. Albert Speer, a Nazi architect, embraced it. So did the iconoclast (and architect) Le Corbusier, who said that ‘a house is a machine to live in’. He built a ‘masterpiece’ near Paris, the Villa Savoye (1931), which leaked. The Savoye family found it ‘uninhabitable’. They wrote ‘Corb’ – ‘It is still raining in our garage. It rains in the hall and bathroom.’

Derived from Art Nouveau (and the Arts and Crafts movement), Art Deco was a pastiche, a mélange: dashes of African, Mayan and Egyptian art (Tutankhamun’s tomb had been found in 1922), with Futurism and Constructivism thrown in. Embellishment contrasted with the plane geometry of Bauhaus. Art Deco permeates the work of artists like Tamara de Lempicka, Erté, Sonia Delaunay; craftsmen like Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, René Lalique and Jean Dunand in France; the architect Timothy Pflueger in San Francisco. [The tiered structure of 1930 buildings owes much to the aesthetic impact of a NYC zoning law (1916) protecting light and air.]

William van Alen’s Chrysler Building (1930) in Manhattan is for many the essence of the style – organic and spectacular. [King Kong preferred the Empire State Building; it was newer (1931) and taller.] For others, it is the Van Cleef Minaudière vanity case. Or the ocean liner, immortalised by Hollywood’s art directors. The French called it Le Style Paquebot. SS Normandie (1935) – the ‘Ship of Light’ – was free of clutter, with sleek lines, sleek furniture and recessed (flattering) lighting; a flagship not just for the French Line, but for a whole era, an explosive fusion of modernity and tradition, but with the emphasis on art. Her first-class dining room – a Hall of Mirrors with ensuite kitchen – had Lalique glass pillars and huge murals by Jean Dupas. The price for such size and spectacle was noise, and cold soup: the distance from kitchen to table could be 100 metres. But her death in New York harbour during WW2 symbolised the death of escapism; and the death of glamour in the coming age of austerity.