art deco essay

Art Deco – A Summary of the Art Deco Era

Art Deco was an art movement that was initially unveiled at an exhibition held in Paris in 1925. While it reached the height of popularity during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Art Deco was actually a movement that had been in development for more than a decade prior to its announcement. Seen as a very decorative art style, Art Deco artists soon experimented with the genres of design, painting, furniture, architecture, and building within its stylistic realm.

Table of Contents

• 1 What Is Art Deco?
• 2.1 The Society of Decorative Artists (1901 – 2000s)
• 2.2 The Exhibition That Formally Initiated the Start of the Art Deco Movement
• 3 An Appropriate Art Deco Definition
• 4.1 Art Deco Design
• 4.2 Art Deco Furniture
• 4.3 Art Deco Architecture
• 4.4 Art Deco Building
• 5.1 Art Deco in America
• 6 Late Art Deco
• 7.1 René Lalique (1860 – 1945)
• 7.2 Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879 – 1933)
• 7.3 William Van Alen (1883 – 1954)
• 7.4 Sonia Delaunay (1885 – 1979)
• 7.5 Tamara de Lempicka (1898 – 1980)
• 8 The Legacy Left by Art Deco
• 9.1 What Is Art Deco?
• 9.2 What Are the Main Characteristics of the Art Deco Style?
• 9.3 What Are Some of the Most Iconic Art Deco Pieces Made?

What Is Art Deco?

Sometimes referred to as simply “Deco”, Art Deco was an art style that was characterized by vivid colors and daring geometry that led to extremely luxurious and detailed artworks. As a visual arts style that incorporated both elements of architecture and design, Art Deco first appeared in France just before the start of World War One. However, this movement was only announced to the public in 1925 at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which was loosely based around the concept of the World’s Fair.

Art Decorates, as it was sometimes known, went on to influence the design of furniture, jewelry, fashion, cars, theatres, trains, and even buildings. Everyday objects, such as vacuum cleaners and radios, were not immune to the impact made by Art Deco and incorporated tell-tale characteristics of the iconic style.

As it worked to integrate advanced styles with exceptional artistry and decadent materials, Art Deco went on to represent opulence, elegance, vitality, and trust in the social and technological progress that occurred in its prime.

From the outset, Art Deco proved to be influenced by the bold geometric forms made famous by the Cubism movement, as well as the bright colors used within Fauvism . Bringing with it a great sense of order, the Art Deco style presented proportionate and balanced designs in lush and cheerful shapes. Art Deco design managed to find its way into many early 20th-century design forms, with the movement experimenting with elements of fine art , architecture, fashion, furniture, forms of transport, and even ordinary appliances.

As an art movement , the features that defined Art Deco were easily identifiable. Deco art was typically recognized as a hodgepodge of different styles and seen as an eclectic amalgamation of various influences, materials, and shapes. Due to this, it can be hard to differentiate the Art Deco style from other similar schools of art like Art Nouveau , Art Moderne, the Bauhaus school, or the Arts and Craft movement.

Despite that, the Art Deco period was an incredibly influential one, with its decorative manner going on to inspire a variety of other artistic styles.

A History of the Art Deco Movement

Towards the end of the 19 th century, many French artists , architects, and designers who were instrumental in the development of Art Nouveau noticed that the movement had become very outdated. With the 20 th century close approaching, and the effects of the Industrial Revolution coming into play, creatives were inspired to produce a style of art that would scream “tasteful and modern” from the rooftops. The Art Deco period was determined to restore France’s reputation as the first-class creator of decorative arts once again.

The establishment of the Salon or Société des artistes décorateurs in France, who designed furniture, interiors, and art, helped raise the respect for art objects.

This society helped to slowly expand the definition of art beyond painting and sculpture into other domains that had not been considered before, such as glassware and jewelry. Eventually, those who created Art Deco works that were not considered to be “fine art” before were suddenly viewed as artists instead of mere artisans.

The polished and streamlined style that was Art Deco grew out of a longing and assertive desire to be free of the past and to welcome the future in all of its manufactured and machine-driven brilliance.

The prominence of the Art Deco era rose and fell in between the two World Wars, with the style playing an important role in molding the West’s modern vision. This was particularly noticeable in France and the United States, where the influence of the Art Deco style could be seen in the types of architecture that were used.

While Art Deco emphasized the features of speed, power, and progression, its artworks were contrasted with the lighter and more delicate elements of the previous Art Nouveau movement to create a truly unique style. Art Nouveau, which was a predominant style before the First World War, was heavily inspired by the natural world and incorporated things like winding vines, flower petals, and flowy waves in the artworks created. This celebration of organic shapes differed greatly from the clean and geometric style of Art Deco.

Seen as quite a structured style, Art Deco took on a very Gatsby-esque self-indulgence based on the types of works created. Adopting features from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel, The Great Gatsby , the Art Deco style celebrated the flamboyance, frivolity, and decadence that emerged during the 1920s in America. Just as the characters within Fitzgerald’s book were fixated with the glitz and glamour that was synonymous with the lifestyle at the time, Art Deco celebrated everything that was considered to be luxurious and forward-thinking.

As an art style, Art Deco was considered to be one of the most exciting eras of design.

It latched onto the flourishing post-war America with its new inventions that were available to even the average person, which led consumer tastes for luxury to go through the roof. As a result, the Art Deco style was forced to quickly develop to reflect this intoxicating sense of progress. Art Deco also evolved alongside other avant-garde movements and aspects of culture at the time, which resulted in a blend of art, design, fashion, and performance.

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Deco art became more subdued as popular taste shifted towards less ostentatious forms that included materials like stainless steel, chrome plating, and plastic. However, the style quickly went out of fashion during World War Two.

During the 1960s, a restored fascination in Art Deco design was fostered and as of today, Art Deco continues to be a key motivation in areas of decorative art, fashion, and even jewelry design.

Representing modernism that was turned into fashion, Art Deco exists as one of the first truly international styles. The purpose behind the artworks was to create a stylish and anti-traditional form of refinement that represented wealth and sophistication. Art Deco marked a time of newly discovered optimism after World War One and oriented itself towards the future and contemporary notions of progress.

The Society of Decorative Artists (1901 – 2000s)

Art Deco reached its peak in 1925 when the French government promoted the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. The only real requirement to exhibit at this fair was that all artworks needed to be “thoroughly modern”, which demonstrated the focus of the movement. The exhibition proved to be incredibly popular and was widely visited, which helped to firmly establish Art Deco in art history. The show also prompted the official name of the movement, Arts Decorates.

This society was made up of famous figures in the art world, like Art Nouveau designer and printmaker Eugene Grasset, and Art Nouveau architect Hector Grimard. Other budding decorative artists and designers also joined this group and helped with the development of its style. The French government proved to be incredibly supportive of this style of art and helped encourage the growth of this artistic activity.

One of the major goals of this group was to contest the hierarchical organization of the visual arts that demoted decorative artists to an inferior status when compared to the more traditional painting and sculpting forms.

This was because the Art Deco style was treated as the “Cinderella” of the art world – supposedly inadequate in comparison to the other forms of art that existed. Based on this, the purpose of the exposition was to introduce the new type of decorative art that had formed but was postponed for several reasons until 1925.

The Exhibition That Formally Initiated the Start of the Art Deco Movement

The French government, which hosted the Exposition International des Arts Decorates et Industrials Moderns were seen as responsible for introducing the Art Deco style into the art world. More than 15,000 artists, architects, and designers went on to present their works at this exhibition that ran for seven months, with over 16 million people from around the world coming to view the individual exhibits. Therefore, this exhibition was regarded as the catalyst that launched the beginning of the Art Deco movement.

An Appropriate Art Deco Definition

When talking about a suitable Art Deco definition, the fact that it was one of the most influential and decorative styles from the beginning of the 20 th century is usually included in the interpretation. Taking its name from the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the term “arts decorates” was first used in France in 1858 before the iconic label of “Art Deco” was decided on. Once the movement had a name, it quickly gained acceptance around the world. 

At first, the term “Art Deco” was used in a disdainful way by the modernist architect Le Corbusier.

The name was used in articles where he mocked the style for its embellishment, which was a feature that Le Corbusier considered to be useless in modern architecture. While supporters of the Art Deco style praised it for its stripped-down approach, its name was still met with much scorn. Only in the late 1960s, when a greater interest was starting to be paid towards the style, was the Art Deco definition restored.

The Art Deco definition was used in a positive way for the first time by British critic and art historian, Bevis Hillier. His definitive use of the term “Art Deco” in his first book, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s , properly cemented the name into art history.

Based on this, the Art Deco definition described the movement as one that was made up of bold geometric shapes and strong colors that were used in a variety of art forms, most notably in architecture and objects.

Different Forms of Art Deco Art

The Art Deco period was characterized by harmonious, clean, geometric, sleek, usually uncomplicated, and visually pleasing artworks. The style’s main visual features derived from repetitive use of linear shapes that frequently included triangular, trapezoidal, zigzag, and chevron-patterned forms. Similar to the precursor movement of Art Nouveau, objects like humans, animals, or even flowers were rendered in a highly stylized and streamlined way in order to maintain the general aesthetic of Art Deco.

In order to keep up with the style’s emphasis on modern technology, Art Deco artists joined natural materials with modern and man-made ones like synthetic plastic, glass, reinforced concrete, and stainless steel. However, when a splash of sophistication was needed from Art Deco artworks, designers worked to incorporate more unusual materials into their works to give off a wealthier feel, such as ivory, horn, and even zebra skin.

Based on this style, the Art Deco movement was less connected to the traditional supposedly superior forms of art that were made up of painting and sculpture.

As Art Deco design was influenced by industrialization and the technical advancements in society, artworks displayed approval for the modernity of the machine and the innate design qualities of machine-made objects. This led to Art Deco primarily being experimented within design, furniture, architecture, and buildings.

Art Deco Design

When it first appeared, the Art Deco style wielded its impact all over the graphic art of the time. This was done in such a way that the impact of Italian Futurism was revealed, as the style’s passion for speed and its devotion to the machine could be seen in the works produced.

The use of lines to denote movement, made famous by Futurist artists, was used by Art Deco creatives in the form of parallel lines and narrowing forms to indicate the concept of balance and streamlining.

Art Deco design went on to feature many aspects that implied motion during the mid-1930s, as movement demonstrated an influence from advanced aerodynamic standards that were developed for aviation and ballistics to diminish aerodynamic drag at high velocities. Shapes that helped to signify motion were then used in many different Art Deco designs and even featured in objects that were genuinely not intended to ever move, such as refrigerators and buildings.

In terms of the imagery produced, Art Deco design elements could be seen in the basic forms and huge sections of solid colors that were used. These features were similar to Japanese woodblock prints, which Art Deco artists looked to for inspiration. The influx of Japanese art into Europe following the First World War left a great impact on countries, most notably France.

Artists found that the simplicity of these woodblock prints mirrored the clearly modern and sleek styles that Art Deco was attempting to create.

Art Deco Furniture

Another prominent feature of Art Deco art was the furniture that was produced during the movement’s era. It was not until the late 1920s that the concept of furniture was even explored, with the avant-garde Art Nouveau furniture designs going on to inspire the up-and-coming Art Deco creatives. The types of furniture that were then created under the new Art Deco style proved to be more basic and less arched in design, with modernity existing as the main message.

As the Art Deco movement continued, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann appeared to be the forerunner in furniture.

While his furniture pieces took inspiration from the Neoclassical style of the 18 th century, he worked to remove as much of the embellishment as possible while still using the luxurious materials preferred by Art Nouveau designers.

These materials included mahogany, ebony, ivory, and even tortoiseshell. As they were completely out of reach for ordinary individuals, his furniture was only available to the most well-off citizens.

As Ruhlmann’s furniture works appeared to fluctuate between the Art Nouveau and Art Deco style , this left a gap in the market for a more definitive Art Deco furniture designer to arrive. This occurred in the form of Jules Leela, who was merely a traditional designer prior to the development of the Art Deco period. Leela, after finding inspiration in the new and exciting Art Deco style, went on to design the furniture featured in the grand dining room of the Elysée Palace in Paris, which was his most iconic project.

Art Deco Architecture

The architecture that emerged from the Art Deco period is possibly one of the most well-known features of the entire art movement. Making its debut in Paris between 1903 and 1904, Art Deco architecture began with the construction of two apartment buildings designed by Auguste Perret and Henri Savage. These two architects worked with reinforced concrete for the very first time in Parisian suburban buildings, with its clean lines, rectangular forms, and lack of decoration on the facade demonstrating a clear departure from the Art Nouveau style.

Art Deco architecture is therefore distinguished by hard-edged and often amply decorated designs emphasized by lustrous metal accents. Many of the buildings designed using the features of Art Deco architecture have an upright emphasis, as they were built in a way that meant to draw the eyes of those walking on the streets upwards.

The buildings created in this style were often rectangular, blockish, and organized geometrically, with the addition of curved ornamental features adding to the sleek effect that was intended.

Some of the most famous American examples of Art Deco architecture include a variety of skyscrapers that were built in New York City, as well as several pastel-colored buildings that were constructed in Miami. In the Interwar period, Art Deco quickly became the most common and popular architectural style available and began to spread to other parts of the world. The influence of Art Deco architecture during the first half of the 20 th century can still be seen when looking at some of the prevailing buildings that still stand in America today.

Art Deco Building

Some of the most recognizable buildings in America today represent the Art Deco style and patterns in its architecture. After World War One, Art Deco buildings that made use of steel and reinforced concrete began to appear all over large cities in America and Europe. In America, these buildings were typically used for offices, movie theatres, railroad stations, and government buildings.

Art Deco building elements also featured in some engineering projects, most notably in the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

The most famous Art Deco buildings, which still exist in their original form today, include Rockefeller Centre, the Empire State Building , and the truly iconic Chrysler Building, all located in New York City. Considered to be the most commemorative expressions of the Art Deco style, these buildings became the tallest and most recognizable contemporary buildings in the world at the time. They were essentially designed to demonstrate the reputation of builders through their height, shape, color, and striking radiance of the evening.

Skyscrapers were seen as a completely modern creation within the Art Deco era.

These buildings emphasized neat lines and stability at an often-dizzying level. New York’s skyline was drastically altered by the Chrysler Building in 1930, which stood as the pinnacle of success when it came to Art Deco building. At 77 floors, it was known as the world’s tallest building for 11 months until construction on the Empire State Building began. The Chrysler Building existed as a large commercial for Chrysler cars.

What made the Chrysler Building so symbolic was its style of decoration. Triangles around the curved tiers adorned the peak of the building, with these shapes being placed in a way that copied the sun gleaming towards a peak. Art Deco gargoyles were also featured as ornamentation that closely imitated the hood ornament of a car.

This gravity-defying skyscraper, as it was described at the time, featured all of the essential Art Deco building elements as it invoked the modern man versus nature struggle in its architecture.

Key Accomplishments of Art Deco

As a modern style of creation, Art Deco attempted to blend functional objects with artistic touches. This is one of the aspects that made Art Deco so different from other fine art styles like painting and sculpture, as artworks had no other real purpose or use beyond functioning as something intriguing for viewers to look at.

With the emergence of widespread manufacturing, Art Deco artists were able to improve the appearance of their mass-produced functional objects so that they were accessible to everyone in society.

One of the biggest accomplishments of the Art Deco movement was the fact that almost everything could be seen as art, from something as simple as clocks, glassware, and ashtrays to more complex creations like cars and buildings.

This demonstrated Art Deco’s quest to find beauty in all facets of life, with the movement’s aim reflecting the considerable originality and mass usage of machine-age technology that existed at the time. Art Deco achieved this by focusing on the elegance and appeal of objects that already existed around us, with another accomplishment of the Art Deco era being its truly democratic aim. Artists attempted to make even the plainest and unrefined objects, like machine-made objects, as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

Art Deco in America

In America, the Art Deco movement was met with a completely different approach. Herbert Hoover, who was the Secretary of Commerce then, stated that no American artists and designers were allowed to display their work at the Exposition International in France. This was because Hoover believed that they were yet to come up with an explicitly American style of art that was sufficiently “new enough”.

In response to this, he sent a group to France to assess the artworks at the Exposition and to bring home any ideas that could be applied in a modern American artistic and architectural sense.

Within this traveling cohort, Hoover included important figures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Institute of Architecture, as well as several individuals from The New York Times . This trip to Europe went on to inspire an almost instantaneous expansion in artistic innovation and creation in the United States.

The American Art Deco style proved to be quite different from the original style that developed in France. Nicknamed “Streamline Moderne”, American Art Deco was a more diminished and sleeker version when compared to the complex and regularly bespoke European Art Deco style.

Emphasizing the technological advancements of the era, American Art Deco quickly grew and expanded to have a far greater following and use in the United States than in Europe.

The presence of a unique Art Deco style helped to return some trust and belief in social progress in America, as the artworks that were created were thought to be an expression of national pride. The American World Fairs in Chicago (1933) and New York City (1939) mainly featured Art Deco designs, as Hollywood adopted the style and made it alluring throughout the country. American Art Deco’s rapid growth created an expression of democracy through its designs, which were made accessible to ordinary citizens.

Late Art Deco

By 1925, two completely different and contending schools coexisted within the Art Deco movement. These schools were made up of the traditionalists and the modernists. The traditionalists, who had originally established the Society of Decorative Artists, included furniture designer Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, interior designer Jean Dunant, sculptor Antoine Bordello, and designer Paul Poirot.

This school of Art Deco was known for its combination of advanced forms with conventional techniques and pricey materials.

On the other hand, the modernists stood out for their blatant rejection of the past. Artists within this Art Deco group sought to find and create an artistic style that was based on new developments in technologies, simplicity, an absence of decoration, and the use of cheaper materials and mass production.

The modernists established their own organization in 1929, which was called the French Union of Modern Artists. Creatives within this group included Pierre Chateau, Francis Jourdain, Le Corbusier, and Sonia Delaunay.

The modernist Art Deco group criticized the traditional Art Deco style, which they formed was only created to serve the wealthy.

This group argued that well-made buildings, for example, should be accessible and convenient to everyone no matter their financial status, and that form should automatically follow function. Based on this, the elegance and charm of an object or building rested upon whether it was perfectly capable of fulfilling its function and not related to the art audience who would most likely be viewing the works.

Notable Art Deco Artists

Many artists participated in the Art Deco movement, ranging from painters, sculptors, interior designers, furniture makers, and architects. Below, we will be taking a look at several notable creatives who created significant artworks within the Art Deco period and whose influence is still discussed today.

René Lalique (1860 – 1945)

French designer René Lalique has gone down in history as one of the world’s most well-known glass art designers from the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. His legacy as an Art Deco artist is still strong today, with his glasswork pieces still highly favored by collectors. During his career, Lalique was best known for his beautiful perfume bottles, jewelry, vases, chandeliers, clocks, and car hood ornaments.

Lalique quickly became one of the most acclaimed Art Nouveau jewelry designers and went on to work for prominent French jewelers like Cartier and Boucheron.

In the 1920s, after Lalique had refined his glass art creations, he rejected the style of Art Nouveau and expressed an interest in fluid and organic forms. This led to him embracing the techniques of the emerging Art Deco style, with his artworks becoming sleeker in the process. Lalique experimented with a variety of new materials, yet he preferred to work with glass.

As he practiced within the Art Deco movement, his style of glassmaking dominated the jewelry industry. Lalique’s triumph was also credited to an older method of glass casting, which was rarely used up until this point, and enabled him to effortlessly produce multiples of the same design. In addition to his dainty perfume bottles and pieces of jewelry, some of Lalique’s monumental Art Deco works include the walls of illuminated glass and glass pillars for the ocean liner, Normandie .

However, one of Lalique’s most well-known glass sculptures was “Victoire”, which he created in 1928.

Made to be a glass hood ornament for a car, Victoire represents a female figure in the wind. With her face keenly sticking out and her hair dangling behind her like a single, sharp wing, this sculpture makes reference to the ancient Greek sculpture, Winged Victory , located in the Louvre. With Victoire existing as both fine art and a sculptural object, it seems to encapsulate everything that Art Deco was due to its truly American style.

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879 – 1933)

One of the most prominent furniture and interior designers within the Art Deco movement was French artist Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann. His furniture designs appeared to be incredibly streamlined, as he made use of very extravagant and outlandish materials that he worked with using his exceptionally delicate craftsmanship. During the movement’s height of popularity, Ruhlmann became a symbol of the opulence and contemporaneity associated with the Art Deco style.

Ruhlmann’s lavish style produced different reactions from a number of different Art Deco designers and architects. Le Corbusier, in particular, responded to the types of artworks produced by Ruhlmann by calling for the creation of uncomplicated and more practical furniture pieces instead. However, Ruhlmann strongly believed that the preservation of art relied entirely on the upper class, with his designs going on to perfectly capture the sensational and magnificent spirit of the time.

Although he was restrictive when it came to ornamentation, Ruhlmann fashioned his furniture pieces out of the most exotic materials at the time. As a firm favorite of the post-war bourgeois classes, Ruhlmann designed furniture that was able to display the newfound wealth and taste of the recently emerging aristocratic society.

Due to this, the greatest achievement of Ruhlmann’s career was said to have been his ability to merge the classical style of the past with the more advanced style of the modern world.

One of Ruhlmann’s notable furniture pieces, produced in 1922, was État Cabinet . Diverging from the typically Art Nouveau style in terms of its symmetry and restricted color palette, Ruhlmann made use of a strong wood that contrasted sharply against the intricate ivory design. Despite this, the elaborate floral features borrowed heavily from the Art Nouveau style, with État Cabinet existing as a more updated and simplified object that seemed stuck between the two styles of Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

William Van Alen (1883 – 1954)

Perhaps the most important artist to come from the Art Deco period was American architect William Van Alen, who designed the iconic Chrysler Building in New York City. Born in Brooklyn, Van Alen went on to study architecture in both the United States and Paris before settling on a specific architectural style. In 1910, after returning from Paris, Van Alen displayed his keen interest in the style of modernism, which was said to have been inspired by the early stages of the still-developing Art Deco movement.

Many of the significant buildings in New York were built during the peak of the Art Deco movement. The famous Chrysler Building, which changed the skyline of the city, was designed by Van Alen in the late 1920s, with the building being completed in 1930.

Built in the Turtle Bay neighborhood on the East Side of Manhattan, the Chrysler Building is known for being one of the most striking skyscrapers in the city. This style of architecture proved to be incredibly popular and continued to be used well into the 1960s.

Completed in less than two years, it was said that approximately four floors were built each week, which was a surprisingly rapid fast for the types of machinery that was available at the time.

Financed by Walter P. Chrysler, the building was designed to make reference to Chrysler automobiles. Van Alen’s original design used many modernist stylistic elements, such as curved windows at the corners. Two of the most recognizable aspects of the building include the famous gargoyles, as well as the seven arched crowns at the top of the tower.

Sonia Delaunay (1885 – 1979)

One of the few female artists who practiced in the Art Deco movement was the Russian-born French artist Sonia Delaunay. Co-founder of the Orphism art movement , Delaunay is said to have been included with other notable Art Deco designers who still hold a strong influence over various fashion trends today. Inspired by the Cubist and Fauvist movements, Delaunay worked closely with fellow Surrealist and Dada artists while perfecting her style. This led to her becoming the first designer to bring abstract inspiration into the realm of fashion.

Delaunay was fascinated with the idea of geometric design, which proved to be modern and essentially fashionable between 1920 and 1930. As a textile designer, in addition to being a painter, Delaunay produced some of her most notable fashion pieces during this time. Color was a major aspect that featured in her works, which she defined as “dynamic art”.

Delaunay’s bold color and textile combinations led to her title of “designer of modern fashion” during the 1925 Exposition in Paris.

Her most well-known garment is perhaps her patchwork dresses, which existed as experimentations of “simultanism”. Mixing a variety of colors and materials, Delaunay made use of different bold blocks of color and loud geometric shapes, which made her dresses stand out. Her success in fashion is partly due to her liberation of the silhouette in female clothing after World War One, with her creations and art still influencing modern fashion houses like Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent today.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898 – 1980)

Another very important female artist who produced artworks during the Art Deco period is Tamara de Lempicka . Possibly one of the most respected and recognizable artists to emerge from the Art Deco movement, Polish-born Lempicka was best known for her refined and trendy Art Deco depictions of the wealthy class and her incredibly stylized paintings of nudes. Settling in Paris after the Russian revolution, Lempicka became fascinated with the nonconformist Parisian lifestyle that existed in the 1920s.

Lempicka’s portraits brought her critical praise and significant wealth. Her style of painting perfectly depicted a lifestyle of luxury and glamour, with inspiration being taken from other movements like Cubism.

Her unique approach to Art Deco painting allowed her to present works that were both extravagant yet clean and precise in nature. The boldness of Lempicka’s colors and her angular style referenced some of the main features of the Art Deco style, which has led to her works being seen as the best representation of Art Deco painting.

Among her iconic works include Young Lady with Gloves , which was painted in 1930 and exists as one of her best-known works. Depicting a fashionably modest lady in a green dress, further emphasized by her subtly matching white hat and gloves, her vivid red lipstick makes her stand out despite her apparent timidness.

The sharp, almost fractured planes of color that were used to depict the facial features and the dress fabric exist as Lempicka’s signature style, which also demonstrates the interplay of Cubism and Art Deco on her artistic style.

Today, Lempicka’s portraits and paintings are still greeted with the same amount of enthusiasm as they were before. While her artworks were originally intended for an elite audience, they have sparked debate across all classes of society and are favored by many. Lempicka was considered to be one of the most prominent portrait painters of her generation, with the clean lines and sleek elegance of her artworks existing as perfect examples of the Art Deco style.

The Legacy Left by Art Deco

The same characteristics that made the Art Deco movement so popular in the beginning, such as its exquisite craftsmanship, rich materials, and ornamentation, eventually led to its decline. The Great Depression, which began in 1929 in the United States and reached Europe soon after, began to slowly foster a sense of deterioration in the art movement.

This devastating economic blow greatly reduced the number of affluent clients who could afford Art Deco furnishings and objects at the time, which led to the style quickly dwindling.

The emergence of World War Two seemed to signify Art Deco’s falling from grace. During the wartime years, the restraint of society caused the Art Deco style to seem even more decadent than it already appeared to be, which was ill-fitting in a time of history that was so solemn. The limited supply of metal that could be recovered was used in building military weapons and equipment instead of decorating buildings and interior spaces. In a society that was so grave at the time, objects like furniture were no longer seen as important status items.

Additionally, the crash of the stock market in 1929 redirected the Art Deco movement towards the concept of mass production. Several technological advancements allowed for more affordable production of basic consumer items, which drove out the need for and subsequent popularity of the existing Art Deco designers. By the early 1930s, Streamline Moderne developed in response to the Art Deco ideals within America, with this new style focusing on the simplification of designs in objects, furniture, and architecture.

Art Deco experienced a revitalization during the 1960s with the beginning of the consumerist culture. Since then, a steady and continued interest in the Art Deco movement can be seen in the various art styles and designs that have emerged, which all seem to carry hints of the streamlined aesthetic of Deco art. Despite Art Deco developing as a movement that aimed to escape the past, it has now become a sentimental and fond memory of a classical style that has proven to be inseparable from the past.

As an art style that still has implications today, the development of Art Deco design has truly been remarkable. Despite being popular almost a century ago, Art Deco was considered to be one of the first styles of modern architecture to really make an impact on the art world. Today, inspiration is still being taken from this quintessential style, which has allowed this decorative type of art to essentially come back into fashion again. No matter how much time has passed, Deco art’s striking geometric shapes will forever remain iconic.

Frequently Asked Questions

Art Deco, which emerged onto the art scene in the early 1920s, was an art style defined by its fascination with modernity. This idea could be seen through the elements of vibrant colors and bold geometric patterns that were used, as the aim was to create lavish and truly opulent artworks. Art Deco is also most famously known for its contribution to architecture.

What Are the Main Characteristics of the Art Deco Style?

The main characteristic of the Art Deco style was its pure admiration for the concept of modernity, as well as its respect for the advancement of machinery and technology. Elements that were able to emphasize simplicity, repetition, and symmetry were frequently used, which allowed Art Deco artworks to appear with a clean and streamlined aesthetic.

What Are Some of the Most Iconic Art Deco Pieces Made?

Art Deco architecture has proven to be the most significant genre of the style, as it has produced some of the most well-known modern buildings to date. These include Rockefeller Centre, the Empire State Building, and the absolutely breathtaking Chrysler Building, all built in New York City.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Art Deco – A Summary of the Art Deco Era.” Art in Context. December 17, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/art-deco/

Meyer, I. (2021, 17 December). Art Deco – A Summary of the Art Deco Era. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/art-deco/

Meyer, Isabella. “Art Deco – A Summary of the Art Deco Era.” Art in Context , December 17, 2021. https://artincontext.org/art-deco/ .

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Art Nouveau and Art Deco History

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 21, 2018 | Original: September 8, 2017

Art Nouveau was an art and design movement that grew out of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th Century. Art Nouveau highlighted curvaceous lines, often inspired by plants and flowers, as well as geometric patterns. Art Deco was a sprawling design sensibility that wound its way through numerous early 20th Century art and design forms, from fine art and architecture to fashion and furniture, as well as everyday appliances and even modes of transportation.

Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts movement, a precursor to Art Nouveau, focused on hand craftsmanship in the decorative arts and was personified by influential textile designer William Morris.

In Art Nouveau, the style of an object is not predetermined and imposed but developed organically through the process of creation, an idea derived from Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Mackintosh believed style came from function, and structures should be built from the inside out. One of his best-known buildings is the Glasgow School of Art, finished in 1910.

Art Nouveau was embraced by architects through the use of curves, iron and glass in designs. The result was buildings like Antoni Gaudí’s sinuous, organic Casa Battló in Barcelona, Spain, completed in 1906.

Art Nouveau in the Visual Arts

Mackintosh’s ideas had a significant effect on the visual arts. Austrian painter Gustav Klimt adopted his abstract patterning, indicative of winding plants, as backgrounds for figurative paintings. Illustrator Aubrey Beardsley brought Art Nouveau to book design, illustrating Sir Thomas Mallory’s La Mort d’Arthur and serving as art editor of the popular Yellow Book magazine in England.

Posters were the main medium through which Art Nouveau was spread. Czech artist Alphonse Mucha’s images of sultry, glamorous women captured the public imagination. His 1894 poster Gismonda , created for entertainer Sarah Bernhardt, brought him his first huge success.

Art Nouveau in Design

Art Nouveau featured object designers rather than sculptors. The best-known is Louis Comfort Tiffany, a former painter who created decorative items for his affluent customers.

Tiffany’s chief innovations were with stained glass, which was crucial to the design of his most famous offering, the Tiffany lamp. Tiffany is also known for his jewelry, boxes, clocks and pottery designs. Clara Driscoll, who worked for the Tiffany from 1888 to 1909, designed most of Tiffany’s most famous lamps, as well as many other items for the company.

French vase maker Emelie Galle formed the influential “Ecole de Nancy” in his hometown of Nancy, France, with bronze sculptor Louis Majorelle, to gather Art Nouveau masters of various disciplines like furniture design and jewelry-making.

By the end of World War I , Art Nouveau had dissipated as a force in the art world. Modernist movements took its place, most notably Art Deco.

Introducing Art Deco

Art Deco was announced to the world in the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, not as a new movement but one that had been in development for more than a decade.

The exposition was a World’s Fair-styled spectacle lasting six months and covering 57 acres in Paris. A popular show based on the exposition toured the United States the following year.

In 1927, Macy’s department store held an influential Art Deco exhibition highlighting eight architects, including Raymond M. Hood, chief designer of Rockefeller Center, and Joseph Urban, set designer and architect of Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida .

Art Deco Spreads

The rise of Art Deco coincided with the scramble to erect skyscrapers, and its influence is felt across America.

Designed in 1928, the Chrysler Building is considered one of the most iconic and most ubiquitous examples. The work of architect William Van Alen, its stainless steel spire with a scalloped base make it instantly recognizable.

Art Deco was the design choice for movie theaters of the era, such as Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles and Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Art Deco was also the guiding principle for stylish transportation, such as Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic automobiles, trains like Henry Dreyfuss’ 20th Century Limited and luxury liners like the Queen Mary.

Art Deco permeated people’s personal lives in its effect on furnishings and decorative items. The design works of Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann in furniture, Jean Besnard in pottery, Rene Lalique in glass, Albert-Armand Rateau in metal, Georges Fouquet in jewelry and Serge Gladky in textiles were just a few to have major and lasting impacts.

Images of Art Deco

In the visual arts, Art Deco promoted a sophisticated sensibility. French painter Jean Dupas is well-known for his murals and print advertising. His famous Les Perruches was shown at the 1925 exhibition. Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka was renowned for her portraits of the rich and famous.

Like Art Nouveau, the graphic arts were crucial in embedding Art Deco in the public imagination and defining the culture linked to it. Charles Gesmar is best known for his posters of French entertainer Mistinguett, which gave identity to the Jazz Age. French artist Paul Colin’s posters of Josephine Baker were prime factors in launching Baker’s career. Jean Carlu pulled inspiration from Cubism and gained fame with his poster for Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film The Kid .

Art Deco also shaped the public view of travel. Ukranian artist Cassandre specialized in transportation posters, most notably his 1935 poster of the French cruise ship Normandie , and is also known for his distinctive advertising work.

Animals were a popular subject among Art Deco artists. Paul Jouve’s paintings and sculptures focused on African animals. Sculptor Francois Pompon’s famous bronze Polar Bear statue debuted at the 1925 exhibition.

Art Deco in Sculpture

Art Deco sculpture frequently found homes in public view. Paul Manship’s most famous work, 1933’s Prometheus , rests in the fountain at Rockefeller Center. Italian-Brazilian sculptor Victor Brecheret found fame with his Monument to the Banderas in Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo, Brazil, which was started in 1921 and completed in 1954.

The imposing, 98-foot tall, 700-ton Christ the Redeemer sculpture on the 2,300-foot peak of Corcovado mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was designed by French sculptor Paul Landowski, with the face by Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida. The statue was completed in 1931 and can be seen from just about anywhere in the city.

American sculptor Lee Lawrie is one of the most-seen and lesser-known Art Deco artists. His work adorns buildings across the United States—the National Academy of the Sciences in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles Public Library, the Nebraska State House, Rockefeller Center in New York City and many other locations.

The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) is also credited for spreading the Art Deco form in the United States with artists like Rockwell Kent, Diego Rivera and Reginald Marsh.

Art Deco Wanes

Art Deco was often aligned with the tastes of the wealthy. The 1929 stock market crash redirected the movement towards mass production.

By the early 1930s, an updated Art Deco called Streamline Moderne (or Art Moderne) took hold in America, simplifying designs and, in architecture, focusing on one story structures to better service more common building needs like gas stations and diners. By World War II , Art Deco and Art Nouveau had fallen out of favor and were largely replaced by Modernism .

Modern Art: Impressionism To Post-Modernism. Edited by David Britt. Art Nouveau. By Jean Lahor. The Spirit and Splendour of Art Deco. By Alain Lesieutre. Art Deco. By Victor Arwas . French Art Deco. Metropolitan Museum of Art .

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The term “Art Deco” has become a collective term for almost any object of conscious design, whether sophisticated or naïve, if it was created between the First and Second World Wars. Included in this bewildering array are objects arising from opposite philosophies and representing all levels of aesthetic quality. Art Deco, as the term is used today, has been applied especially to the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, silver, interior design) as well as to architecture, graphics, painting and sculpture. Artists as different as Mies van der Rohe and Marie Larencin, Fernand Leger and Rene Lalique have been included under the broad umbrella of this stylistic term.

Art Deco is an abbreviation of the title of the most important Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925. Although extensive and influential, the Exposition was not an unbiased representation of modern styles. It included talents as divergent as the architect Le Corbusier, the ebeniste, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, the silversmith Jean Puiforcat, and the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz, but it did not include artists of the Dutch De Stijl movement or Weimar Bauhaus. A desire to promote Paris as the preeminent center of world design and the lingering animosities of World War I kept work of German and Austrian designers out of the Exposition in spite of the existence there of excellent schools of modern design for several decades. Today the term is used loosely to cover a wide range of styles, particularly in the decorative arts, whether or not these were included in the 1925 Exposition.

Some critics object to the “jazzy” sound of the words “Art Deco”, pointing out that this emphasizes the flashy “roaring twenties” aspect of the style, bringing to mind “the saxophone, the raccoon coat, black lace stockings, feather fans and the Stutz Bearcat.” (1) It might be more accurate to describe the period styles as “The Nineteen Twenties Style” (2) or “Les Annees ‘25: Art Deco/Bauhaus/Stijl/Esprit Nouveau” (3) or “style moderne” as it was called at the time. Others maintain that it was precisely the exuberant popular side of the style that was most innovative and is of the greatest lasting interest. (4)

Differences in emphasis and meaning have been reflected in previous exhibitions. These have tended, on the one hand (the pioneering 1966 exhibition at the Musee des Arts Decoratif, Paris, and the 1970 exhibition at Finch College, New York), to emphasize the “high style” work of the architect-designers and the designer-cabinet makers, ceramicists, glassmakers, and metal workers. On the other hand, the 1971 exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts combined mass-produced objects ranging from well-designed to kitsch with the “high style” to produce a more complicated, and perhaps more confusing portrayal of the period style.

The present exhibition is an attempt to define more precisely the term “Art Deco.” It presents the various styles of the 1920s and 1930s, emphasizing that diversity is typical and characteristic of the period as a whole. “High style” design in the traditional sense of the ebeniste cabinetmakers and silversmiths (examples by E.J. Ruhlman, Edgar Brandt, Jean Puiforcat, Rene Lalique, Jean Durand and others are represented in this show), was reserved for the wealthy elite who could afford to pay the exorbitant premium for custom production. In spite of the modernist characteristics of simplified design influenced by cubism, Futurism, and the colorful exoticism of the Ballet Russe, these designers thought back to the French craftsman tradition. They, like their 18th and 19th century predecessors, spared neither labor nor material. Richness was achieved by the use of rare woods, precious metals, and even animal skins, often in exotic combinations, rather than through applied sculptural decoration. Style and “taste” were all-important and these designers thus assumed not only the attitude of their predecessors but sometimes borrowed forms which they simplified from 18th and 19th century prototypes. Of particular influence are the classicizing Louis XVI, Empire, and Biedermier styles.

This traditional point of view was contrasted by Le Corbusier, those working at the Bauhaus, and French designers like Robert Mallet-Stevens. These artists were keenly attuned to the implications and needs of a highly industrialized mass society. Designs by master avant-garde artists could be made available through mass production to a vast number of people. These men denounced “style,” traditional taste and historicism as meaningless to modern society. The chaise longue of Le Corbusier and the cantilevered tubular steel chair of Mies van der Rohe represent successful accommodation of design to industry. If one compares these objects with the chair by Ruhlmann, the diversities of the Art Deco style should become clear. The spare, functional, geometric aesthetic of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus lent itself better to mass production. Many handsome, well-designed objects for daily use, whose designers are not well known, owe much to these architects, as can be seen in the Sunbeam coffee pot on exhibition in the Bergman gallery.

Today these more avant-garde architect-designers are generally considered to have made the most important contribution to 20th century design. Some maintain that their work is on an entirely different plane from a Ruhlmann or a Dufrene and should not be considered in relation to Art Deco at all. Although both philosophies included certain similar characteristics such as simplification of line, geometric forms and plain surfaces, it is interesting to note that at the time of the 1925 Exposition, Le Corbusier’s Pavillion de l’Esprit Nouveau was considered by Brandt and Ruhlmann, principal organizers of the Exposition, to be of secondary importance. Le Corbusier’s Pavillion was relegated to an obscure corner of the fair grounds and received little critical attention. Today a fair appraisal of concurrent trends between the two World Wars would be incomplete without the inclusion of the Bauhaus designers, Le Corbusier, and other French designers of similar interests.

A characteristic common to both of these polar opposites was that they designed “ensembles” where an interior was conceived and coordinated by a master designer or governed by one philosophy. Originating with the teachings of William Morris and groups such as the Weiner Werkstatten, founded in 1903 by Kolomar Moser and Josef Hoffman, and the Deutscher Werkbund of 1907, this organization into groups of common approach and philosophy gained in importance after the War. It was exemplified not only by the Weimar Bauhaus founded by Gropius in 1919, but, in a very different way, also by the Compagnie des Arts Francais, founded in 1919 by Louis Sue and Andre Mare, the Primavera gallery at the Parisian department store Au Printemps, and other Parisian workshops.

The majority of objects classed today as Art Deco fall somewhere between the two extremes. These often lack the considered and exquisite craftsmanship of Ruhlmann furniture or Brandt ironwork or the tectonic lucidity of Le Corbusier or Bauhaus designers. In addition, other influences were numerous. Modern fascination with speed and machines inspired artists and designers to incorporate dynamic geometric forms to express and reflect these phenomena. The excitement caused by the opening of Tutankhamens’s tomb in 1922/3 is revealed in many of the objects of the period. A new interest in the Indian cultures of North and South America is seen in objects as different as furniture with decoration in the form of a ziggurat (exhibited in the Bergman gallery) and a Tiffany Desk Set (exhibited at the Renaissance Society). Other motifs such as stylized flowers, elegant animals and fish (borzoi, gazelles, and angelfish), sunrays, and lightning bolts became familiar Art Deco vocabulary. Contemporary fashions and interests from modern dance, tennis and archery were executed in a stylized way in bronze, porcelain and ivory. Mass production made these designs, too, available to a large number.

The concurrent trends that have come to be known as Art Deco operated at many different levels. Some distinctions can be made however, without necessitating the exclusion of interesting or pertinent objects.

• Katherine Morrison McClinton, Art Deco, a guide for Collectors, New York, 1972
• Following the example of Yvonne Brunhammer in her book of that title, London, 1969.
• As was done in the title of the exhibition of 1966, Musee des Arts Decoratifs.
• Bevis Hillier, Art Deco, London, 1968; The World of Art Deco, text by Bevis Hilier, exhibition catalogue, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1971.

This text was originally published in the exhibition catalogue.

Art Deco’s Streamlined Designs Envisioned a Glamorous Future

Art Deco grew out of a yearning, aggressive desire to be rid of the past and embrace the future in all its man-made, machine-driven glory. The aesthetic movement rose and fell in the period between the two World Wars and played an outsize role in shaping the West’s modern imagination, particularly within France and the United States. (New York, Chicago, Miami, and San Francisco—to name just a few American cities—all boast prominent Art Deco architecture.) A Gatsbyish hedonism descended on prosperous post-war America; new technologies made cars, radios, and refrigerators accessible to the average person; and consumer tastes for ornament and luxury skyrocketed. As a result, design evolved to reflect and enhance this heady sense of advancement.

The sleek, streamlined designs of Art Deco—also called “style moderne”—emphasized speed, power, and progress, contrasting with its lighter, airier predecessor, Art Nouveau , the dominant fin-de-siècle style. Art Nouveau took inspiration from the natural world: twisting vines, flower petals, and undulating waves characterized sensuous paintings by Alphonse Mucha , as well as fantastic architectural designs by Antoni Gaudí . While Art Nouveau celebrated organic shapes, Art Deco lionized clean lines and geometric patterns.

Art Deco grew out of a desire in France to reestablish the country as a top-tier producer of decorative arts. The establishment of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs around the turn of the century raised the respect for objets d’art. The definition of art began to expand beyond painting and sculpture and into domains like glasswork and jewelry, with creators of the latter coming to be considered artists, rather than artisans.

The movement also evolved in step with avant-garde art movements and other aspects of culture. Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque reduced three-dimensional objects to flat, geometric forms; the Dutch architecture and design faction De Stijl , exemplified by Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld , touted a simplified aesthetic. The popularity of exotic, oriental motifs—spurred on by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 and epitomized by ballets like Scheherazade —also played a role. Theater and dance, particularly the Ballet Russes , influenced figures across disciplines. Artists such as Sonia Delaunay and Léon Bakst , for instance, designed costumes and sets for the ballet, and the elaborate productions likewise featured in paintings and sculptures. Indeed, the intermingling of art, design, performance, and fashion played a large role in shaping the evolution of Art Deco.

The style reached its apex in 1925, when the French government sponsored the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The design fair’s only real requirement was that all work had to be “thoroughly modern.” Widely visited, the expo established the movement on the world stage and prompted the official title of “Art Deco” (a shortened version of “Arts Décoratifs”). In the 1930s, the glamorous style began to wane, becoming more austere as the Great Depression shifted popular taste toward less extravagant, ostentatious forms.

A modern architecture for modern cities

The rise of the modern city came with the rise of the skyscraper: a thoroughly modern invention that emphasized clean lines, solidity, and dizzying scale. The Art Deco treatment was often applied to public buildings like theaters or banks, but the skyscraper goes furthest in embodying the style, which achieved international popularity.

New York’s Chrysler Building may be the most famous example. Completed in 1930, it held the title of the world’s tallest building for a proud 11 months before it was eclipsed by the Empire State Building. Triangles emanate from the rounded tiers decorating the top of the Chrysler Building; the arrangement resembles the sun radiating toward a peak, invoking the man-over-nature power captured by the gravity-defying skyscraper. As an architectural cherry on top, the building’s iconic metal gargoyles are extraordinarily sleek, bearing more of a resemblance to the hood ornament of a car than the motif’s traditionally fearsome Victorian counterparts.

Sculptural friezes and bas-reliefs were also popular adornments to building façades. Stylized renditions of classical gods proved popular, appearing on Chicago’s Sheridan Theater and Buffalo’s Industrial Bank Building, to name a few.

Renewed interest in Art Deco has more recently prompted various restoration projects, most notably at movie theaters. Talking pictures were a wildly popular new medium in the 1920s, and movie stars became public obsessions. Movie theaters were dubbed “palaces” and bedecked with bright neon lights, chicly decorated interiors, and huge screening rooms. California in particular boasts a host of movie palaces; today, you can catch a film at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre or San Francisco’s Alameda Theatre in all their original splendor.

Good design for all people and all things

Alavoine of Paris and New York, Wel-Worgelt Study , ca. 1928-1930. Designed by Henri Redard and executed by Jean Dunand. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

To complement the modern extravagance of Art Deco architecture, the splendor of the interiors had to match. During this time, interior designers became celebrities in their own right. The furniture designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann was known for artfully shaped end tables and angular chairs. His series of interior design sketches, published as the compendium Harmonies: Intérieurs de Ruhlmann , offers mesmerizing glimpses into the ideal Art Deco home. Bright colors and luxe materials qualify the gracefully rounded tables and colossal mirrors in one entryway, while his bedroom designs offer patterned walls and enormous, sculptural seats.

Maurice Dufrêne was another sought-after furniture designer known for his elaborate interiors of salons and boutiques (he headed the design workshop at the Galeries Lafayette, the mammoth Parisian department store). Another peer, Jean Dunand , earned a reputation for his lacquer furniture, created with novel Japanese techniques.

This aesthetic also extended to functional design objects such as car ornaments, tea sets, and jewelry. Everyday objects were often made of new materials that reflected the thirst for cutting-edge technologies. A popular design for the newly accessible home radio, for instance, was as a stylized object made of Bakelite, a recently developed type of consumer plastic. Many artists didn’t restrict themselves to one medium, but worked across disciplines.

In the 1920s, jewelry designer and glassworker René Lalique turned his attention to glasswork, metal, and enamel: expensive man-made materials that befitted the new style’s obsession with modernity. In addition to sleek vases and perfume bottles, Lalique crafted hood ornaments (also known as “mascots”) for cars—also a technology becoming more widely accessible during this time—which are miniature sculptures all unto their own. In Cinq Chevaux (1925), created for the new Citroën 5CV, five simplified horses with streamlined manes and tails leap forward, implying force and energy.

Jean Després was another famed jeweler and designer. His Unique Tea Service (ca. 1935) takes the familiar, rounded form of a teapot and turns it into a gleaming silver prism, full of right angles and sleek lines. Reimagining everyday objects like tea services and silverware shows the extent to which Art Deco’s practitioners envisioned the reach of modernity into daily life. (Ironically, this desire was often more aspirational than functional, as many of the tea sets were simply too impractical to actually use.) Museums helped canonize these objects as fine art: In 1923, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York established its first modern design gallery, filling it with Art Deco pieces by the likes of Ruhlmann and Lalique.

Freeing fashions for the new woman

Clothing was as much a part of the Art Deco style as furniture, jewelry, and sculpture. Women’s choice of dress reflected their fight for civil liberties and increasing independence. Glamour and liberation, therefore, overtook tradition and constraint.

The designer Paul Poiret , in particular, revolutionized women’s fashion, and is credited with the “death of the corset,” paving the way for the daring flapper style (though he took issue with the look’s short skirts). Poiret designed dresses that relied on sensuously draped fabrics rather than fussy, tailored styles. One fashion illustration shows two women, outfitted in loose, flowing Poiret dresses, examining an image of a woman in a tightly corseted gown. The work draws an explicit comparison between the old guard and the new: The “modern” women are depicted in color, while the rest of the image is black and white, lending a sense of vivacity and life to the pair.

Illustrations such as these were popular. Printed in widely read magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue , they emphasized Art Deco’s role in everyday life. Russian-born, Paris-based costume and fashion designer Erté was the first and most lavish Art Deco stylist; he earned the title “Father of Art Deco” for his luxurious designs featuring flowing lines, draped fabric, and sparkling geometric ornamentation that celebrated all things modern. Erté went on to outfit everyone from Joan Crawford to Lillian Gish to Anna Pavlova, both in movies and on the red carpet. Over 22 years, he created more than 250 covers for Harper’s Bazaar .

Other illustrators like Paul Colin and Georges Lepape were also instrumental in shaping the era’s fashion trends: Colin’s posters of dancing women and Lepape’s slender, boldly colored women in straight-cut skirts have stuck in the popular imagination as quintessentially Art Deco.

Traditional arts take on new forms

Lee Lawrie and Rene Chambellan, Atlas , TKTK, at the Rockefeller Center, New York, NY, 2016. Photo by Travis Wise, via Flickr.

While the decorative arts thrived, traditional art forms like painting took a backseat. In fact, Tamara de Lempicka was the sole painter who worked in an Art Deco style. Independently successful, the elegant Polish artist, who worked in France and New York, embodied the new roles for women. Rendered in a style inspired by Cubism and imbued with a sense of motion, the stylish socialites in Lempicka’s paintings—curls bouncing, dresses flying—ooze power and sexuality. Often gazing straight at the viewer, her subjects have agency (scenes rarely include men), and seem to emphasize the idea of the “modern woman.”

Her Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti (1929), in particular, embodies Art Deco’s ideals of technology and progress: The power of the automobile—and the novel independence of a woman driving it—is topped off by the subject’s cold and unapologetic stare. The angular lines on the car, the hard gloss of the metal, and Lempicka’s flying drapery all underscore the image as something new, a creation of the 20th century.

While Art Deco neglected painting, it doubled down on sculpture, which was prolific in both the public and private realm. Small figurative sculptures were popular; artists like Demetre Chiparus and Jan and Joël Martel created stylized bronze miniatures of animals, women, and mythological gods. Maurice Guiraud-Rivière ’s La Comète (1925), for example, evokes the speed and excitement of the moment with a streamlined female form who slices through the air as her hair streams above her, conjuring a blade or an airplane wing.

Larger sculptures by artists like Paul Manship and Emile-Antoine Bourdelle livened up public spaces, particularly the plazas of notable Art Deco buildings. Sculptors had a taste for reinterpreting classical mythological themes that centered on the body. Lee Lawrie and Rene Chambellan’s Atlas , located in front of New York’s Rockefeller Center, is one of the most visible examples. Linear muscles pattern the Titan, whose gracefully arcing arms hold up the world on his athletic shoulders. Like the majority of Art Deco sculptures, Atlas is made of bronze.

Art Deco is one of the most lasting styles to come out of the past 100 years; it has become so ingrained in our day-to-day lives that we often don’t notice it at all. Institutions like Radio City Music Hall in New York or the Palais de Tokyo in Paris have become Art Deco icons, but smaller, more everyday things—from fonts to salt and pepper shakers to movie theaters —are often shaped by this modern style’s high hopes for the future.

• Vertical The Example Article Title Longer Than The Line By Example Name Jan 1, 1970

• Virtual Tour

Art Deco Style

While researching the Art Deco style, and its resurgence in the late 1960’s, I came across this wonderfully written and informative essay in the publishing content of the amazing THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY at the University of Chicago. This essay explains and highlights the many different directions within the Art Deco style, and reflects a much more inclusive, deeper understanding than the introductory blog post on the basics of Art Deco posted last week.

ESSAY BY LOUIS J. NATENSHON, KATHARINE L. KEEFE, 1973

The term “Art Deco” has become a collective term for almost any object of conscious design, whether sophisticated or naïve, if it was created between the First and Second World Wars. Included in this bewildering array are objects arising from opposite philosophies and representing all levels of aesthetic quality. Art Deco, as the term is used today, has been applied especially to the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, silver, interior design) as well as to architecture, graphics, painting and sculpture. Artists as different as Mies van der Rohe and Marie Larencin, Fernand Leger and Rene Lalique have been included under the broad umbrella of this stylistic term.

Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes held in paris in 1925..

Although extensive and influential, the Exposition was not an unbiased representation of modern styles. It included talents as divergent as the architect Le Corbusier, the  ebeniste,  Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, the silversmith Jean Puiforcat, and the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz. It did not include artists of the Dutch De Stijl movement or Weimar Bauhaus. A desire to promote Paris as the preeminent center of world design and the lingering animosities of World War I kept work of German and Austrian designers out of the Exposition in spite of the existence there of excellent schools of modern design for several decades.

Today the term is used loosely to cover a wide range of styles, particularly in the decorative arts, whether or not these were included in the 1925 Exposition. Some critics object to the “jazzy” sound of the words “Art Deco”, pointing out that this emphasizes the flashy “roaring twenties” aspect of the style, bringing to mind “the saxophone, the raccoon coat, black lace stockings, feather fans and the Stutz Bearcat.” (1) It might be more accurate to describe the period styles as “The Nineteen Twenties Style” (2) or “Les Annees ‘25: Art Deco/Bauhaus/Stijl/Esprit Nouveau” (3) or “style moderne” as it was called at the time. Others maintain that it was precisely the exuberant popular side of the style that was most innovative and is of the greatest lasting interest. (4)

The Diversity of Art Deco

The present exhibition is an attempt to define more precisely the term “Art Deco.” It presents the various styles of the 1920s and 1930s, emphasizing that diversity is typical and characteristic of the period as a whole. “High style” design in the traditional sense of the  ebeniste cabinetmakers and silversmiths by E.J. Ruhlman, Edgar Brandt, Jean Puiforcat, Rene Lalique, Jean Dunand and others was reserved for the wealthy elite, who could afford to pay the exorbitant premium for custom production. In spite of the modernist characteristics of simplified design influenced by Cubism, Futurism, and the colorful exoticism of the Ballets Russes, these designers thought back to the French craftsman tradition. They, like their 18th and 19th century predecessors, spared neither labor nor material. Richness was achieved by the use of rare woods, precious metals, and even animal skins, often in exotic combinations, rather than through applied sculptural decoration. Style and “taste” were all-important, and these designers thus assumed not only the attitude of their predecessors, but sometimes borrowed simplified forms from 18th and 19th century prototypes. Of particular influence are the classicizing Louis XVI, Empire, and Biedermeier styles.

Rich Tradition versus Architect Avant Garde

This traditional point of view was contrasted by Le Corbusier, those working at the Bauhaus, and French designers like Robert Mallet-Stevens. These artists were keenly attuned to the implications and needs of a highly industrialized mass society. Designs by master avant-garde artists could be made available through mass production to a vast number of people. These men denounced “style,” traditional taste and historicism as meaningless to modern society. The chaise longue of Le Corbusier, and the cantilevered tubular steel chair of Mies van der Rohe represent successful accommodation of design to industry. If one compares these objects with a chair by Ruhlmann, the diversities of the Art Deco style should become clear. The sparse, functional, geometric aesthetic of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus lent itself better to mass production. Many handsome, well-designed objects for daily use, whose designers are not well known, owe much to these architects, as can be seen in the Sunbeam coffee pot on exhibition in the Bergman gallery.

Today these more avant-garde architect-designers are generally considered to have made the most important contribution to 20th century design. Some maintain that their work is on an entirely different plane from a Ruhlmann or a Dufrene and should not be considered in relation to Art Deco at all. Although both philosophies included certain similar characteristics such as simplification of line, geometric forms and plain surfaces, it is interesting to note that at the time of the 1925 Exposition, Le Corbusier’s  Pavillion de l’Esprit Nouveau was considered by Brandt and Ruhlmann, principal organizers of the Exposition, to be of secondary importance. Le Corbusier’s  Pavillion was relegated to an obscure corner of the fair grounds and received little critical attention. Today a fair appraisal of concurrent trends between the two World Wars would be incomplete without the inclusion of the Bauhaus designers, Le Corbusier, and other French designers of similar interests.

Common Ground

A characteristic common to both of these polar opposites was that they designed “ensembles” where an interior was conceived and coordinated by a master designer or governed by one philosophy. Originating with the teachings of William Morris and groups such as the Wiener Werkstätten, founded in 1903 by Kolomar Moser and Josef Hoffman, and the Deutscher Werkbund of 1907, this organization into groups of common approach and philosophy gained in importance after the War. It was exemplified not only by the Weimar Bauhaus founded by Gropius in 1919, but, in a very different way, also by the Compagnie des Arts Francais, founded in 1919 by Louis Sue and Andre Mare, the Primavera gallery at the Parisian department store Au Printemps, and other Parisian workshops.

What We call Art Deco 

The majority of objects classed today as Art Deco fall somewhere between the two extremes. These often lack the considered and exquisite craftsmanship of Ruhlmann furniture or Brandt ironwork or the tectonic lucidity of Le Corbusier or Bauhaus designers. In addition, other influences were numerous. Modern fascination with speed and machines inspired artists and designers to incorporate dynamic geometric forms to express and reflect these phenomena. The excitement caused by the opening of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922/3 is revealed in many of the objects of the period. A new interest in the Indian cultures of North and South America is seen in objects as different as furniture with decoration in the form of a ziggurat (exhibited in the Bergman gallery) and a Tiffany Desk Set (exhibited at the Renaissance Society). Other motifs such as stylized flowers, elegant animals and fish (borzoi, gazelles, and angelfish), sunrays, and lightning bolts became familiar Art Deco vocabulary. Contemporary fashions and interests from modern dance, tennis and archery were executed in a stylized way in bronze, porcelain and ivory. Mass production made these designs, too, available to a large number.

The concurrent trends that have come to be known as Art Deco operated at many different levels. Some distinctions can be made however, without necessitating the exclusion of interesting or pertinent objects.

Works Cited

• Katherine Morrison McClinton,  Art Deco, a guide for Collectors, New York, 1972
• Following the example of Yvonne Brunhammer in her book of that title, London, 1969.
• As was done in the title of the exhibition of 1966, Musee des Arts Decoratifs.
• Bevis Hillier,  Art Deco,  London, 1968;  The World of Art Deco,  text by Bevis Hilier, exhibition catalogue, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1971.

This text was originally published in the exhibition catalogue.

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French Art Deco

Art Deco—the term conjures up jewels by Van Cleef & Arpels, glassware by Laique, furniture by Ruhlmann—is best exemplified in the work shown at the exhibition that gave the style its name: the Exposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925. The exquisite craftsmanship and artistry of the objects displayed spoke to a sophisticated modernity yet were rooted in past traditions. Although it quickly spread to other countries, Art Deco found its most coherent expression in France, where a rich cultural heritage was embraced as the impetus for creating something new. the style drew on inspirations as diverse as fashion, avant-garde trends in the fine arts—such as Cubism and Fauvism—and a taste for the exotic, all of which converged in exceptionally luxurious and innovative objects. While the practice of Art Deco ended with the Second World War, interest in it has not only endured to the present day but has grown steadily.

Based on the Metropolitan Museum's renowned collection French Art Deco presents more than eighty masterpieces by forty-two designers. Examples include Süe et Mare's furniture from the 1925 Exposition; Dufy's Cubist-inspired textiles; Dunand's lacquered bedroom suite; Dupas's monumental glass wall panels from the SS Normandie ; and Fouquet's spectacular dress ornament in the shape of a Chinese mask. Jared Goss's engaging text includes a discussion of each object together with a biography of the designer who created it and is enlivened by generous quotations from writings of the period. The extensive introduction provides historical context and explores the origins and aesthetic of Art Deco. With its rich text and sumptuous photographs, this is not only one of the rare books on French Art Deco in English, but an object d'art in its own right.

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Art Lesson: The history of Art Deco

Purpose of this lesson:

Entering a new decade means entering into a new, exciting time. If you take a second to think about it, each decade of your life has brought on incredible new things, there have been times of uncertainty and prosperity, and as the 2020s are ushered in, it can be exciting, or worrisome, depending on your perspective, of where we will be in another 10 years. Before we get too far into 2020, though, taking a look back at the 1920s, the Roaring Twenties, the time of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby himself, to see what the art world looked like then. Thus, this lesson will focus on Art Deco, a movement that has become synonymous with the 1920s and has continued to influence the design world, artists, and architects, alike, not to mention those who like to ponder about what life would be like as a flapper in a New York speakeasy. During this lesson, we will focus on the history of Art Deco and its lasting legacy in architecture and art.

This lesson is best for secondary or high school level students. It can be used in both studio and art history classes.

Getting Started:

1) Get students thinking about the 1920s and the Art Deco style by asking questions that will prompt a discussion. Start a list on the chalkboard of the things students say. Such questions might include:  

• What comes to mind when you think of the 1920s?
• What aesthetic styles come to mind when you think of the 1920s? **Listing these in a group will be helpful moving forward as you’ll discuss typical Art Deco themes during the lesson.**
• Do you think of Art Deco more for traditional artworks, i.e. sculptures, paintings, etc., or for architectural works?
• Do you know any artists, architects, artworks, or buildings that are particularly reminiscent of the Art Deco movement?
• What do you think contributed to the rise of Art Deco?

2) Definitions to keep in mind:

• Art Deco: a popular design style of the 1920s and 1930s characterized especially by bold outlines, geometric and zigzag forms, and the use of new materials (such as plastic). (Merriam-Webster)
• Art Nouveau: a design style of late 19th century origin characterized especially by sinuous lines and foliate forms. (Merriam-Webster)
• a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals. (Tate Modern)
• a school of art founded in [The Netherlands] in 1917 typically using rectangular forms and the primary colors plus black and white and asymmetric balance. (Merriam-Webster)
• Bauhaus: a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919. (Tate Modern)

3) The Lesson

Part I: What is Art Deco?

An iconic style, Art Deco (short for Arts Décoratifs) is usually a pretty easy aesthetic to recognize. It’s emphasis on strong lines, geometric shapes, and bold materials creates a style that stands out when found next to other eras of art and architecture. The movement really kicked off in 1925 but it wasn’t something that sprung up overnight. The movement also underwent some changes and is usually sectioned off into two phases. At their core, both the first and second phase of Art Deco stick to a few main principles but each period morphed to fit the times that surrounded them.

Art Deco built off of a foundation laid by Bauhaus principles, the de Stijl movement, Cubism, Constructivism, and Futurism. The movement was also quick to adopt new technologies meaning materials were not always the most traditional. Early Art Deco works utilized expensive sleek components while the later years of Art Deco put plastics and more affordable materials to use. The movement was used as inspiration for architecture, art, and design around the world. While visiting most an major city, from Rio de Janeiro to Moscow, you are sure to see Art Deco features.

Like any movement, Art Deco is characterized by a number of visual cues including:

• Linear and geometric designs that utilize triangular, zigzagging, and chevron patterns
• Simplified figures and shapes
• Long lines with crisp edges
• Low relief decorative panels
• Step back facades (in relation to architecture)
• Strips of windows (in relation to architecture)
• Use of materials like plastic, Bakelite, stainless steel, and chrome

Part II: The history of Art Deco

Art Deco as a movement feels like it was exactly what the 1920s needed and in a lot of ways, that’s because it wasn’t something that popped up on the art scene. Instead, it was a movement years in the making. Coming off the back of World War I, it was a time when people, particularly those in Europe, and even more so those with money to spend, had the chance to think of a future. It ‘ grew out of a yearning, aggressive desire to be rid of the past and embrace the future in all its man-made, machine-driven glory .’ Art Deco would be a short-lived movement, in the end, as less than 20 years would pass before the outbreak of World War II, but it thrived and burned bright during its time.

At the turn of the 20 th century, Art Nouveau, which sprung from the Arts and Crafts movement , was one of the more popular styles. When you think of the Metro in Paris, that’s the Art Nouveau style. Based on organic shapes and nature, Art Nouveau was far more ornate that Art Deco but it was what Art Deco found roots in. Without Art Nouveau, it’s possible the Roaring Twenties would have looked very different.

The movement grew out of Europe in the 1920s where Art Deco began picking up speed. In 1925, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was held in Paris. Spanning nearly 60 acres in the heart of France, the exhibition lasted six months. During that time, more than 16 million people came through to see the works of more than 15,000 artists, architects, and designers alike. The exhibition catapulted the movement into the mainstream and it heavily impacted the trajectory of the movement.

Although Europe was the birthplace of Art Deco ideals, the US was arguably where the movement most hit its stride, but when the 1925 exhibition occurred, there were no US artists present. This was by the mandate of then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover who didn’t allow and US artist or designers to partake. Instead, Hoover organized a team of American architects, artists, and designers to attend the exhibition as a reconnaissance mission of sorts. The following year, the US had a similar exhibition titled ‘A Selected Collection of Objects from the International Exposition Modern, Industrial and Decorative Arts,’ which showed in a number of major US cities.

Art Deco coincided with a huge US growth spurt, thus, it was utilized in a number of major architectural feats like Radio City Music Hall, by architects Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey. Art Deco became an emblem of the modern city as did skyscrapers around the same time. When completed in 1930, the Chrysler Building, designed by architect William van Alen, became the height, quite literally, of Art Deco style.

** Here, show students an image of the Chrysler building, see if they can point out its Art Deco characteristics before moving on to discuss the building. Be sure to mention its unusual gargoyles, too! **

The building’s crown of sleek, radiating triangles mimics the sun rising dizzyingly high over the city. Its long lines and smooth curves emphasize its height, punctuated by gargoyles that severely streamlined and more resembling a car’s hood ornament more than traditional gargoyles, all adding up to a fine work of Art Deco architecture.

While Art Deco was favoured by many, it of course had its detractors. Le Corbusier was among those who did not appreciate the style and was one of the first to refer to the Arts Décoratifs as Art Deco. When he used Art Deco, which eventually stuck, Le Corbusier was criticizing the movement for its aesthetic.

During World War II, Art Deco fell out of fashion and was disused until the 1960s when it saw a resurgence in interest. It was lovingly revisited, and still is today, as a style that harkens back to time quite different to today in between two the two World Wars and amongst the hardships of the Great Depression.

Part III: The phases of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne

The reason that Art Deco split is simple: The Great Depression happened. At the onset of the era of Art Deco, the economy was booming, so the first phase of Art Deco breams with expensive and luxurious materials, essentially, think of the movies The Great Gatsby , and you’ve got it. However, when the Great Depression began with Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929, the day the Stock Market in New York crashed and largely considered to be the day that the Depression began), the US economy quickly went downhill and its effects were quickly felt around the world.

As the depression set in around the world, Art Deco morphed into its second phase. During this time, more expensive materials were substituted out for more affordable ones and the style was paired down in general. During the second phase, most Art Deco structures were more austere, which was pragmatic and conceptual. In architecture, the second phase focused less on verticality and more on low structures symbolizing strength.

From the second phase of Art Deco came Streamline Moderne, a style of Art Deco that was born out of the US. Streamline Moderne took the second phase of Art Deco’s principles and meshed them with some from New Objectivity, a German movement, to create a style that was more or less devoid of ornamentation. When it came to architecture and design, the movement made use of clean curves, horizontal lines, bands of windows, glass bricks, and porthole windows.

4) Wrap up/Activity:

To wrap up a studio art class on Art Deco, have students create an artwork in the an Art Deco style. For a more self-sufficient class, they could choose their own way to tackle the project. If you have a class that requires more direction, consider a poster-type artwork that reflects the sleek styles of Art Deco advertisements, etc.

If this lesson is given in an art history class, perhaps have them chose and Art Deco building and research it further, addressing how it is Art Deco and how it perhaps is not. You can allow them to look for a building online, or you can have them take a look around your town for buildings that have Art Deco themes, whether they be from the Art Deco era or more recent.

Art Deco by The Art Story

Art Deco’s Streamlined Designs Envisioned a Glamorous Future

Art Nouveau and Art Deco History

Art Deco by Tate

Art Deco Style 1925 – 1940

Additional Images:

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Did the Barbie movie cause a global pink paint shortage?

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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Modernism — A Movement in the Decorative Arts: Art Deco

A Movement in The Decorative Arts: Art Deco

• Categories: Design Modernism

About this sample

Words: 448 |

Published: Mar 1, 2019

Words: 448 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Duncan, A. (2002). Art Deco. Thames & Hudson.
• Hillier, B. (1968). Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. Studio Vista.
• Isenstadt, S., & Ma, L. (Eds.). (2008). Modernism and the Decorative Arts in America: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Norton Simon Museum. Yale University Press.
• Lambourne, L. (2019). Art Deco: A Modernist Revolution. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
• Loyer, F. (2018). Art Deco: The Twentieth Century's Iconic Decorative Style from Paris, London, and Brussels to New York, Sydney, and Santa Monica. The Monacelli Press.
• Parissien, S. (2013). Art Deco. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Rawsthorn, A. (2020). Design as an Attitude. JRP|Editions.
• Savage, R. (Ed.). (2013). Art Deco London. ACC Art Books.
• St. Moritz Art Masters. (2011). Art Deco: A Guide to the Decorative Style 1920-1940. St. Moritz Art Masters.
• Wood, G. (2003). Essential Art Deco. Victoria and Albert Museum.

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What are the main characteristics of the Art Deco style?

The characteristic features of Art Deco reflect admiration for the modernity of the machine and for the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects—e.g., relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry , and unvaried repetition of elements. Art Deco objects often showcase simple, clean shapes, usually with a “streamlined” look; ornament that is geometric or stylized from representational forms such as florals, animals, and sunrays; and use of man-made substances, including plastics , vita-glass, and reinforced concrete , often combined with such natural materials as jade , silver , ivory , and chrome.

Related Questions

Art Deco Architectural and Art Style – History, Characteristics and Artists

What is art deco.

Art Deco emerged in France in 1910 and continued until 1937, just before World War II. The new art movement, following the period of Art Nouveau, moved beyond painting and sculpture, and focused on decorative arts including jewelry, glass, textiles, furniture, and architecture.

Notable Art Deco Artwork

Characteristics of Art Deco Style

Art Deco was a purely decorative style that added modernity to everyday life. The Art Deco movement applied less to painting and sculpture and instead sought to promote beauty in the decorative arts, with or without a utilitarian function.

Art Deco was a theatrical style that combined classicism with symmetry and a repetitive use of sleek lines and geometric patterns. Art Deco was in total opposition to Art Nouveau which used natural elements such as curling vines and floral motifs. When nature was part of Art Deco designs, plants, animals, and people were highly stylized.

European or French Art Deco tended toward the more opulent, while in most case American Art Deco was paired down. Luxury material included ivory, horn, zebra, gold, silver, mother of pearl, granite, and marble. Less expensive material included chrome, plastic, Bakelite, stainless steel, and concrete.

The color palette in art deco included, metallic gold, silver, red, brown, beige, pink, yellow, orange, black, lavender, purple, maroon, grey, green and all tones of blue.

Characteristics of Art Deco Architecture

Art deco buildings were designed with an emphasis on the vertical, using blocky forms. The Chicago Tribune Tower, built in 1925, by architects John Mead Howells (1868- 1959) and Raymond Hood (1881-1934) was the first Art Deco building in North America. Afterwards, in New York, and other large cities, skyscraper office towers were built with roof top ornamentation emphasizing the great heights.

Banks were built in Art Deco style to symbolize their importance. Art Deco movie theatres were glamorous with lavish interiors like velvet curtains and seats.

In Miami, Art Deco pastel buildings lent a feel of modern tropical design, as did the whitewashed Art Deco hotels in South Florida.

A Historical Look at Art Deco

The creative community in France wanted to produce high end decorative arts that elevated artisans to the level of artists. The establishment of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs (The Society of Decorative Artists) was founded in 1900.

After World War I (1914-1918) the public wanted to enjoy life, and this gave them a taste for luxury. The new modern styles were what they were looking for.

The Society of Decorative Artists in France

The Society of Decorative Artists consisted of founding members such as Swiss born Eugène Grasset (1914-1918) a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, as well as French architect and designer Hector Guimard (1867-1942) both of whom were regarded as distinguished figures in Art Nouveau. It also included Francis Jourdain (1876-1958) furniture designer and interior decorator who was making strides in Art Deco.

The World Launch of Art Deco

Spread over 75 acres across Paris, with more than 15,000 artists, the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Moderne) supported by the French government saw over 15 million visitors. The event opened by President Gaston Doumergue (1863-1937) on April 28, 1925 and continued until the fall of the same year.

Art Deco (a shortened version of “Arts Décoratifs”) was featured along with paintings, sculpture and design from Cubism , Futurism , De Stijl and Bauhaus . Pavilions were built, with lavish interiors representing 20 European nations including Great Britain, USSR, Sweden, Greece, Latvia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Global Growth of Art Deco

After the exhibit Art Deco became a global phenomenon between 1925 to 1937. It caught on in the United States, especially in major cities including New York, Chicago, Miami, and San Francisco.

London’s Underground Railway incorporated elements into their system. Havana, Cuba built major neighborhoods with Art Deco architecture. The influences of the movement were realized in Indonesia and Australia.

Art and Influence on the Art Deco Movement

Art Deco grew along with the modern culture and world events. It was influenced by Cubism (1907) and the works of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and George Braque (1963) who flattened the three-dimensional to geometric forms . Futurism began in 1909 with works that appeared to be in motion from artists such as Umberto Boccioni (1882-1963), and Gino Severini (1883-1966) appealed to the modern sensibility of Art Deco design.

The Netherlands-based De Stijl movement, a group of artists, designers and architects who represented modern design, founded in 1917, provided inspiration. Led by painters Piet Mondrian (1887-1944) and Theo van Deosburg (1883-1931 ) it promoted a simplified aesthetic.

The DeStijl group known for its use of primary colors, straight lines, squares, and rectangular forms, worked to merge painting and sculpture into architecture and industrial design. The group’s work in architecture was the start of Bauhaus-inspired International Style of the 1920s and 1930s.

Early Architecture: A Precursor to Art Deco

The Rietveld Schroder House, in Utrecht, Netherlands, designed by De Stiji artist Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) was a precursor to the Bauhaus inspired International Style, the client, Truss Schroder-Schrader, who commissioned the house in 1924, requested it to be a home without walls. Constructed with concrete, brick, plaster, wood, and steel girders, the interior of stark black and white was built to have portable walls.

Art Deco grew alongside the Bauhaus school established in Germany, by German architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969) with the philosophy of paired down industrial design and clean lines.

Archeology and Art Deco

Ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Mesoamerican architecture provided elements of the classics and exotic to Art Deco art and architecture. The discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 saw a resurgence of all things Egyptian. Decorative motifs were taken from Egyptian scrolls and became decorative elements in interiors such as the elevator doors at the Chrysler Building, New York. Cartier and other jewelers began making jewelry and decorative items such as the Cartier Temple Clock.

Greco-Roman reliefs and patterns became popular decorative elements and were used in places such as the entrance of the Rockefeller Center, in New York.

Travel, Technology and Art Deco

Architecture was influenced by technology. Sleek designs of planes, trains, automobiles, and luxury steamer ships were incorporated into Art Deco, as people began to travel more.

Merging Art, Design, Performance and Fashion

Art, design, performance, and fashion merged. Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes first came to Paris in 1909, creating works where artists, musicians and dancers combined their talents to create spectacular stage performances that influenced both audiences and the creative community.

The public turned to movies and the star they saw on the silver screen, like Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, and Ingrid Bergman, all portrayed living in stylish city apartments and country homes.

Art Deco and The Great Depression

After the stock market crash of 1929 designs became less ornate. Objects became mass produced. A paired down version of Art Deco buildings continued to be constructed for the sturdy nature and look of resilience.

Important Art Deco Artists and Architects

Art deco painters.

Art Historians agree that Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980 ) is the painter who best represents the Art Deco era . The Polish born artist lived a glamorous lifestyle, travelling between Paris and United States frequently.

In 1929, she painted one of her most famous works Self Portrait in a Green Bugatti wearing a racing cap, long leather gloves and red lips. The work appeared on the cover of the Germen fashion magazine Die Dame . Young Lady with Gloves  (1930)   is another of her well-known works.

Art Deco Sculptors

Chiparus, Demetre Haralamb (1886 – 1947) the Romanian born sculptor studied in Italy. After working in Art Nouveau style, he started working in the Art Deco style and crafted works representing performers in the Ballets Russes, Moulin Rouge and Folies Berger. His materials of choice were bronze, ivory and even terra cotta. Austrian born sculptor Joseph Lorenzl (1892-1950) was also inspired to design sculptures of the female form, especially dancers.

German born architectural sculptor Lee Lawrie (1877-1963) left his mark in America as one of the most prominent sculptors of the Art Deco era. He is most famous for the freestanding bronze of Atlas outside Rockefeller Center, in New York City.

American artist Rene Paul Chamberlain (1893-1955) also worked as an Art Deco architectural sculptor who favored “Greco Deco” also known as Stripped Classical. This style combined Greek and Roman traditions with Art Deco sensibility.

Art Deco Jewelry, Decorative Objects and Stylish Homewares

Jewelry was at its height of glamor during the Art Deco era. Works crafted in rubies, sapphires, diamonds, onyx, jade, and lapis were in demand. Clip brooches, wide flexible bracelets, and long sautoir necklaces, often with tassels made of seed pearls, appeared in jewelry displays.

Cartier headquartered in Paris, designed their Tutti Frutti collection of jewelry using a combination of Indian rubies, sapphires, and emeralds set together in colorful designs. Van Cleef & Arpels also headquartered in Paris created mosaic works of art in jewelry using the Mystery Setting without any visible metals to adhere the gemstones.

Customers wanted more than just jewelry from the top jewelry stores in the world like Tiffany’s, in New York, and desired decorative objects for their homes.

French born Jean Després (1889-1980) trained in metalworks. His fascination with airplanes and industrial design were captured in his jewelry, sometimes adding real machine parts.

The art deco artist also designed household serving objects such as tea and coffee sets, cutlery, trays, and pitchers. Although these pieces were meant to be utilitarian the overly stylized works sometimes made this impossible.

French born René Lalique (1860-1958) started his career as a jeweler’s apprentice. Then, in 1905, he opened a store that carried both jewelry and glassworks. Starting with works in Art Nouveau he shifted to the more modern and streamlined styles of Art Deco, creating perfume bottles, candlesticks, lamps, car hood ornaments and jewelry.

This one-of-a-kind Art Nouveau necklace René Lalique created for his wife made from gold, enamel, opals, and amethyst , now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shows how the artists was ahead or the trends.

Art Deco Fashion and Costume

Russian born Romain de Tirtoff, better known as Erté (1892-1990) was an artist, fashion designer and illustrator, in Paris, whose influential drawings appeared on the cover of Vogue. He designed sets for the opera and costumes for the stage that represent the style of the era.

Russian born artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) also lived in France. Although she created some well-regarded visual art during her career she was best known for her colorful, patterned textiles, that became part of the fashions she designed for the modern woman.

Before this, Delaunay designed the costumes for The Ballets Russes’ 1919 production of Cleopatra , setting fashion trends for the fashionable women in Paris.

Art Deco Architecture

American Architect William Van Alen (1883-1954) built the Chrysler Building, an office tower in New York City, which today is still one of the most famous Art Deco skyscrapers in the world.

Built in 1930, for automotive mogul businessman Walter P. Chrysler, the stainless-steel structure radiates into a sunburst on the upper levels, with gargoyles on the top, as if part of a hood ornament of a car. Van Alen brought the style of the outside inside with geometric shapes in stainless steel, glass, and ceramics.

Art Deco Interiors

Avant-garde furniture in France was initially pared down Art Nouveau before Art Deco developed the style for which it is known. Coffee tables, tea tables and side tables were also part of the era. Chairs became round, deep, and low to the ground. Club chairs crafted in leather were part of the Art Deco style.

Hungarian born Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) became famous for designing The Club Chair (Model 3) or Wassily chair by completely deconstructing the original, while a Master at the Bauhaus school. The new chair was minimalist in design and made from nickel plated tubular steel, screws, and cotton canvass for upholstery. He also designed the Cesca chair using tubular steel.

French born Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933) designed using bright colors, angular chairs, rounded tables, and luxurious materials, also created carpets, wallpapers, and textiles. Maurice Dufrêne (1875-1933) a French furniture designer, preferred woods like mahogany and used simple unadorned design.

Swiss born Jean Dunand (1877-1942) introduced Japanese techniques and lacquer furniture and other objects for the home.

Donald Deskey’s (1894-1989) interior design of New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, is an example of American Art Deco style using geometric designs in glass, leather, chrome, and aluminum.

The Decline of Art Deco Style

Art Deco started to decline during the Second World War in Europe and North America. Metals were no longer used for decorative arts but were needed to build arms. Furniture lost its status and technology made cheaper pieces more accessible.

Today, Mid-Century Modern design has similarities with the sleek design of Art Deco and the simplicity of Bauhaus design.

Art Deco Artists and Architects

• Eugène Grasset (1914-1918) Swiss
• Hector Guimard (1867-1942) French
• Francis Jourdain (1876-1958) French
• Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) Polish
• Chiparus, Demetre Haralamb (1886 – 1947) Hungarian
• Lorenzl (1892-1950) Austrian
• Lee Lawrie (1877-1963 ) German
• Rene Paul Chamberlain (1893-1955) American
• Jean Després (1889-1980) French
• René Lalique (1860-1958) French
• Romain de Tirtoff, better known as Erté (1892-1990) Russian
• Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) Russian
• Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933) French
• Maurice Dufrêne (1875-1933) French
• Jean Dunand (1877-1942) Swiss
• Donald Deskey’s (1894-1989) American
• Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964)
• Walter Gropius (1883-1969) German
• Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) Hungarian
• William Van Alen (1883-1954) American
• John Mead Howells (1868- 1959)
• Raymond Hood (1881-1934)

Art Deco Terms

• Arts Décoratifs
• Art Nouveau
• Ancient Egyptian
• Greco-Roman
• Stripped Classical
• Mesoamerican

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A Complete Guide to Art Deco Furniture

By Adam Hencz

“Only the very rich can pay for what is new and they alone can make it fashionable.”  Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann

No other movement in decorative arts and architecture was ever able to celebrate urban life in such a glamorous and luxurious manner as Art Deco . After a century of its golden days, the iconic design style is making its way back into mainstream design and is blossoming in cities like Los Angeles and Dubai, where glamorous interiors are spiced up by modern Art Deco furniture. Advocating technological progress, sophistication and craftsmanship, Art Deco seems to be forever in trend.

Even though the style gained prominence and international acclaim at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, its underlying features and design forces appeared decades earlier, even before World War I. The style undoubtedly originated from early 20th century France, and it is believed that the first one to use the diction ‘Art Deco’ was designer and architect Le Corbusier in a series of articles titled “1925 EXPO. ARTS. DÉCO.” where he attacked the lavishness at the Exposition and developed his anti-decorative theory based on the idea that “Modern decoration has no decoration.” However, the term did not enter common usage until 1966, when the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris hosted Les Années 25: Art déco, Bauhaus, Stijl, Esprit nouveau , an exhibition covering the major styles in the 1920s and 1930s.

Art Deco conquered America and the globe at full tilt, and with its luxurious marble- and metal-lined interior design, the Chrysler Building is a stunning example of how total the style’s domination was by the end of the roaring twenties. The glamorous lifestyle of the era is sometimes also dubbed as the Great Gatsby style, as it was immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel that depicts ​​Jay Gatsby and his flamboyant lifestyle in the jazz age. The style flourished internationally, and in the 1930s Art Deco furniture became a synonym for elegance and functionalism. It made a global impact and profound influence on architecture and the visual arts, car and ship manufacturing, jewelry, and fashion, as well as transforming everyday functional objects along with interior and furniture design.

What is Art Deco furniture ?

Furniture designed in the early years of the movement did not sell to the average consumer, but was targeted to grasp the attention of high society, who started taking a great interest in luxury goods. In the 1920s, major department stores in Paris transformed their decorating departments from Art Nouveau to Art Deco and played an important role in providing customers with a vast array of luxury products from jewelry through ashtrays and coffee tables to large pieces of Art Deco bedroom furniture, all promoting the fresh movement.

Designers were not just craftsmen and cabinet makers, but often thrived in other disciplines like lighting and material design as well as architecture. They designed entire buildings, homes, and corporate offices along with their entire interiors often for wealthy clients and businesses. These makers include notable names such as Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Edgar Brandt, Charles Picquet, and Paul Follot. The movement revolutionized interior design and Art Deco furniture is hugely popular among connoisseurs even today. However, what is that distinguishes Art Deco furniture from Art Nouveau , or Bauhaus , or other modernist designs? We have gathered its main characteristics, those that make it easy to recognize them from other common turn-of-the-century furniture designs.

Art Deco furniture: style and characteristics

Art Deco as a decorative style is defined by geometric patterns, naturalistic motifs, bold colors, and sinuous outlines that are also well reflected in furniture design trends of the period. High-end modern Art Deco furniture was meticulously crafted into refined forms, using ebony and exotic woods manufactured with traditional methods like veneering and marquetry. Art Deco furniture was always polished, and Japanese lacquer was often used to achieve a shiny finish. Besides peculiar wood, expensive materials like ivory, wrought iron, and glass were also gracefully used by designers of the era.

Exotic woods

The Art Deco era meticulously crafted furniture made of rich, exotic woods such as ebony or lemonwood, or zebrawood.

Art Deco waterfall furniture

Distinguishing features of waterfall furniture are the rounded drops at the edges of all horizontal surfaces, created to mimic a flowing waterfall. It was widely popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s when waterfall furniture was produced primarily for the mass market and often in poor quality. This pair of late 1930s walnut burl nightstands is a delightful exception.

Art Deco craftsmanship often involved applying several coats of lacquer for a delicate finish, giving a smooth sheen and a timeless look to the piece.

Marquetry refers to the technique of ​​forming geometric bandings and intricate designs out of different kinds of wood such as boxwood, satinwood, ebony, or even ivory. Traditional, natural marquetry patterns are prominent features of pieces of furniture of the era.

Rich leathers were also used for manufacturing armchairs, club chairs, and sofas, making such pieces a handsome addition to a stylish living room, office, or den. Club chairs usually had a tight back design, rolled arms, and square tapered legs made of premium leather combined with handcrafted hardwood.

Relevant sources to learn more

Iconic Designer Chairs Everyone Should Know Functional Art? Art, Design and the fluidity of genres Art Deco Design: Meet the Most Influential Designers

Wondering where to start?

By Colin Fanning

Like other major American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, Philadelphia was an epicenter for the exuberant strain of architecture and design activity that came to be known as Art Deco. Fueled by the area’s economic importance and increasingly urban character after the First World War, designers, corporations, and manufacturers all engaged in a broad search for a distinctly American form of design appropriate for the modern age.

Art Deco is generally considered to have its roots in the French moderne style that arose in the early twentieth century. Although the style contained great variety, moderne furniture, decorative objects, and interiors were generally characterized by restrained, simple forms (some inspired by classical or otherwise traditional precedents) rendered with luxurious materials like exotic wood veneers, precious metals, or sharkskin. The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris celebrated this approach, showcasing the most modern of Europe’s decorative arts. While the United States did not participate in the exhibition, the event was heavily covered in the press and had a palpable impact on the design professions. American Art Deco was also influenced by avant-garde European art styles, particularly Cubism, that attempted to capture the rapid technological, economic, and societal changes of the interwar period.

The larger umbrella of “Art Deco” (a term applied retroactively by later scholars) included a diversity of simultaneous and even contradictory stylistic approaches, from luxurious upscale goods and interiors inspired by the French moderne to the more populist, mass-market products of the machine age that arose after the onset of the Great Depression . But it was precisely this heterogeneity that made Art Deco such an intriguing and widespread vein of design, and the creativity of interwar architects, designers, and manufacturers would leave a lasting legacy on the built environment of Greater Philadelphia.

Philadelphia architect William L. Price (1861–1916) and his firm Price & McLanahan, although best-known for their involvement in the Arts and Crafts movement , signaled some of the directions later Art Deco architecture would take with their 1916 expansion of the Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, into a massive resort complex with an innovative concrete structural system. The hotel combined bold architectural massing, radically modern construction techniques, and a rich decorative program—elements that would come into play in many Art Deco buildings of the 1920s and 1930s.

Iconic Skyscrapers

One of the building types most closely associated with Art Deco was the skyscraper, a triumphant icon of construction technology, American financial might , and the growing cultural power of large cities. One of the earliest Art Deco skyscrapers in Philadelphia proper was the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Armed Forces Building (today a luxury apartment building, The Metropolitan) on Fifteenth Street near Arch Street in Center City. Completed in 1928 and designed by the New York–based architect Louis Jallade (1876–1957), the tower featured distinct zigzag banding on its upper stories and a colorful cornice of modular geometric terra cotta decoration. Other notable examples of similarly adorned high-rise Art Deco buildings in Philadelphia included Ritter and Shay’s Market Street National Bank (1319 Market Street; built 1931); Tilden, Register & Pepper’s Sun Oil Building (1608-1610 Walnut Street; built 1928); and the Architects Building at 121 S. Seventeenth Street, completed around 1930. Designed by the prominent French-born, Philadelphia-based architect Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945), who in this later phase of his career moved sharply away from the Beaux-Arts style toward the moderne , the Architects Building housed numerous architectural offices and attested to the central role of the profession in shaping the city’s modern landscape.

Large corporate or institutional clients turned to Art Deco in an attempt to project an image of modernity as well as an optimism in technological and cultural progress. Philadelphia’s WCAU Building (1931) at 1622 Chestnut Street, the first radio-station headquarters in the country to be purpose-built, also expressed the excitement of new material treatments for architecture. Architects Gabriel Roth (1893–1960) and Harry Sternfeld (1888–1976) created an unusual façade that incorporated crushed glass and decorative metalwork in brass, copper, and stainless steel. The Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance headquarters by the firm of Zantzinger, Borie & Medary (completed 1928; today the Perelman Building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art), meanwhile, was a lower-rise building whose decoration took inspiration from classical forms, highlighting how interwar designers reworked and simplified historical styles to signal a modern spirit.

A grand example of a civic building in the Art Deco mode was the United States Post Office (built 1931–35 by the firms Rankin & Kellogg and Tilden, Register & Pepper in partnership) at the intersection of Market and Thirtieth Streets. The limestone-clad building was organized much like a factory to accelerate the mail-distribution process, and its rich but selectively applied decoration visually reinforced the ethos of speed and efficiency.

In addition to these large, expensive corporate and civic buildings, a concurrent thread of Art Deco was manifest in smaller-scale, more populist kinds of architecture like theaters, storefronts , and eateries. Business owners who wanted to mark their establishments as up-to-date and stylish deployed moderne decoration and new materials. Architect William Harold Lee (1884–1971) designed several theaters around greater Philadelphia, while Ralph Bencker (1883–1961) designed many of the region’s numerous Horn and Hardart’s automat cafeterias. And despite Art Deco’s close association with big-city life, it was not solely an urban phenomenon: The main streets in smaller communities in surrounding parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware often sprouted “modernistic” buildings as businesses competed for customers’ attention.

Transportation Makeover

American notions of progress were often tethered to transportation as a particular arena of invention. Amid the rise of widespread car ownership , the gradually increasing accessibility of air travel , and the luxurious experience connoted by the great ocean liners—all modes of travel that frequently carried their own Art Deco styling— railways in particular felt a need to project an image of modernity to remain competitive. Railway station architecture was one prominent vehicle for such design activity. The exterior entrances of Suburban Station (built 1930) in Center City Philadelphia appealed to the spirit of the age through exuberant decorative metalwork. Although Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station (built 1929–34 by Chicago firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White) sported an exterior in the Beaux Arts tradition, its grand interiors epitomized the simplified moderne approach to classicism.

In addition to self-consciously modern station architecture, the Pennsylvania Railroad experimented with the design of locomotives and rolling stock to reinforce their connotations of speed and modernity. Locomotives like the iconic S1 Class and the interiors of passenger cars designed by the prominent industrial designer Raymond Loewy (1893–1986) typified the vogue for “streamlining” that emerged with a force in the 1930s. Characterized by smooth contours, rounded forms, and a general horizontality often heightened by bands of “speed lines” (whether the object was meant to be mobile or not), streamlining was one material manifestation of a widely held sense that the modern world was running at a faster pace than in previous periods.

Despite the interwar romance with speed, a primary motivator for the streamlining trend was economic. In the 1930s, companies turned to professional designers to imbue products with expressive qualities without significant factory retooling. Some critics saw these attempts to stimulate consumer desire through novelty as blatantly commercial, or even morally dangerous, but streamlined products and vehicles proved hugely popular in the marketplace. Consumers in greater Philadelphia encountered the products of the young field of industrial design, whether streamlined or in a more minimal “machine” style, in contexts both commercial and cultural. Department stores were a key venue for the dissemination of new ideas in design, while arts institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art played a prominent role with exhibitions like the 1932 Design for the Machine: Contemporary Industrial Art . The museum displayed an array of furniture, appliances, and other home goods designed to take advantage of modern manufacturing techniques, and the installation opened with a mock storefront by noted New York industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague (1883–1960) that echoed the Art Deco architecture appearing across the region.

While many of the most famous firms, designers, and manufacturers featured in these displays were based in New York or Chicago, some production took place around Pennsylvania, capitalizing on its long industrial history and transportation connections. The prominent Westinghouse Company was based in Pittsburgh, while the Stehli Silks Corporation—best-known for its “Americana Prints” collection (manufactured 1925–27), commissioned from artists to capture the “modern spirit” of the country—maintained a large mill in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, until 1975, with operations peaking in the 1920s. On the more exclusive end of the textile spectrum, Philadelphia’s House of Wenger (active 1903­–38) created luxurious clothes responding to the taste for streamlined modern forms in fashion as well as home goods.

Craftsmanship Valued

Mass-produced goods and the growing prominence of the industrial design profession came to dominate the decorative arts under the Art Deco umbrella, but there remained a thread of high-end making that prized individual craftsmanship and traditional techniques while it adapted to twentieth-century sensibilities. Samuel Yellin (1885–1940), a Philadelphia ironworker deeply rooted in the Arts and Crafts tradition, was one such exemplar, producing architectural elements like gates, railings, and grilles in the 1920s and 1930s that complemented the design language of the thoroughly modern buildings for which they were commissioned.

As the Depression marched on and construction and manufacturing slowed ever further, federal involvement in the arts through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Public Works Administration (PWA) supported some later buildings and works in the Art Deco vein. Harry Sternfeld’s post office building at Ninth and Market Streets in Center City (built 1937–41) incorporated relief sculptures by Edmond Amateis (1897–1981) in the moderne style shared by many other WPA-funded artworks. Similarly, the Edward W. Bok Technical High School (built 1935–38) was a PWA-supported project with restrained geometric Art Deco ornament.

However, a number of overlapping factors contributed to the slow decline and eventual end of Art Deco’s fashionability, including compounding economic difficulties in the 1930s and finally the onset of World War II . Stylistically, avant-garde attention in the design professions shifted toward the more strictly rationalist “International Style,” modeled after the progressive theories of European modernism. As a result, Art Deco was increasingly seen as overly decorative and retrogressive. It wasn’t until the 1960s that scholars began to reevaluate the style as a distinct expression of the economic and cultural complexities of the interwar United States. Philadelphia’s own Art Deco legacy reflects this national history in microcosm, from the commercial circumstances that birthed the city’s first skyscrapers, to the rise of radio and other forms of mass entertainment, to the WPA’s attempt to stimulate the Depression economy through art and design.

In the twenty-first century, Philadelphia’s Art Deco buildings remained in somewhat mixed condition: many have been demolished or stripped of their ornamental architectural details. Others, however, retained their characteristic Deco styling, contributing to the distinctive character of many Philadelphia neighborhoods. Accordingly, organizations like the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia continued to actively advocate for Art Deco’s importance to the region’s built heritage.

Colin Fanning is Curatorial Fellow in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He holds an M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2016, Rutgers University

Installation View of Design for the Machine: Contemporary Industrial Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1932

Philadelphia Museum of Art

In 1932, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s curator of decorative arts, Joseph Downs, organized a large exhibition focused on industrial design. Its title, Design for the Machine , pointed to the exhibition’s focus on modern manufacturing and the aesthetic challenges and opportunities it presented to designers. Many of the objects and mock interiors in the exhibition fell under the minimal functionalist aesthetic championed by European modernist architects and designers, but other works—like this shop front designed by prominent industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague, or models of ocean liners, automobiles, and locomotives—referenced the visual language of Art Deco, particularly the “streamline moderne” style. Widely published and lauded in the national press, the exhibition represented a major exposure for Philadelphia-area arts patrons to the new ideas and growing energy of industrial design and mass manufacturing.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Library and Archives, record no. 1932DM_ShopF.

Design Drawing for Passenger Car Interior, 1936, Raymond Loewy

Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum

French-born, New York-based industrial designer Raymond Loewy began his career as a window designer for department stores, but would go on to achieve great fame for his work in the arenas of automotive, railroad, and aviation design, as well as consumer products and corporate branding. Loewy’s relationship with the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) began in 1934 and lasted until the early 1950s, with his office contributing designs for everything from locomotives to dinnerware and napkins for the PRR’s dining cars.

This drawing shows a proposed design for a refit of a commuter car interior in the popular “streamlined” style that the PRR and other railroads adopted in the 1930s. The contoured armrest panels, colorful upholstery, and linoleum flooring were meant to convey an overall impression of speed, efficiency, and modernity. While this scheme appears to have remained at the conceptual stage, it illustrates the extent to which the PRR saw design as a key aspect of its business, particularly as it faced growing competition from other modes of transport.

Drawing, Interior Color Treatment for “MP-54” Coach Passenger Car, May 26, 1936; Designed by Raymond Loewy (American, b. France, 1893–1986); airbrush and watercolor, gouache, brush and metallic paint, graphite on paperboard; Mat: 55.2 x 48.3 cm (21 3/4 in. x 19 in.); Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 2012-1-1. 

Pennsylvania Railroad S1 Locomotive at the New York World's Fair, July 15, 1939

Library of Congress

The S1 Class was a massive experimental steam locomotive developed by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) in the later 1930s, intended as a prototype for an eventual replacement of its aging fleet. The largest passenger locomotive ever built, the S1 sported a highly streamlined “cowling” designed by the New York-based industrial designer Raymond Loewy.

Like many other companies in the 1930s, the railroad hired a well-known designer not only for his styling skills, but also to lend the cachet of his name to the project. (PRR’s competitor, the New York Central Railroad, had successfully done the same with its own streamlined locomotives and passenger cars designed by Henry Dreyfuss.)

While the purported reason behind the locomotive’s streamlined cladding was the aerodynamic advantages when traveling at high speed, it was as much an effort to impart an aura of modernity and excitement to rail travel, an industry that was struggling under increased competition from automobiles and commercial aviation.

Thirtieth Street Station, Main Waiting Room

Visit Philadelphia

Like Suburban Station, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Thirtieth Street Station (designed by the Chicago firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White and built between 1929 and 1934) was an architectural statement of the railroad’s ambitious efforts to embody efficiency, modernity, and stylistic panache. Where Suburban Station relied on more abstract geometric Art Deco motifs, Thirtieth Street Station was an exemplar of the “classical moderne” approach. Its exterior is more rigidly neoclassical, but the grand main waiting room filters the luxurious connotations of antique ornament through Art Deco simplicity and abstraction. (Photograph by R. Kennedy)

Suburban Station Entrance, 1931

PhillyHistory.org

With growing competition from other modes of transportation in the 1920s and 1930s, large railroad companies like the Pennsylvania Railroad worked to project an image of stylishness and modernity through the design of their stations, locomotives, and passenger cars. Art Deco styling, with its connotations of speed and technological progress, often represented an attractive choice. Suburban Station in Center City Philadelphia, built around 1930, was a collaboration by several architectural firms (including Chicago-based Graham, Anderson, Probst & White and the Philadelphia-area Thalheimer & Weitz) and carried many features of the Deco style, including decorative geometric metal- and stonework.

The building entrance in this photograph is located on Sixteenth Street at JFK Boulevard. The underground station remains in use, serving the regional commuter lines.

Pittsburgh Building at Sesquicentennial Exhibition, 1926, designed by Edward B. Lee

Art Deco styling made prominent appearances at several interwar international exhibitions held in American cities, underscoring the optimistic notions of technological and social progress that characterized these large public events. At the 1926 Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, close on the heels of the influential 1925 Paris exhibition, the gargantuan Pennsylvania State Building (designed by Ralph Bencker) and the smaller pavilion representing Pittsburgh—the only municipality to build its own exhibit at the exposition—by Pittsburgh architect Edward B. Lee (1876–1956) were prime examples of modernized classicism, appearing all the more progressive for their contrast with the romantic, retrospective colonial-style buildings surrounding them. Many of the moderne buildings at the exhibition celebrated the commercial power and technological innovation of United States industries.

Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building (former Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company building)

One prominent thread of Art Deco fused the historicism that had long characterized American architecture with the increasingly prominent vogue for abstract, geometric forms, exemplified by the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company headquarters. Completed in 1928 by the architecture firm Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary, the building sat across from the classical, rigorously historicizing Philadelphia Museum of Art, completed in the same year.

Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary had also contributed to that large project, overseen by prominent architect Horace Trumbauer, but the Fidelity Mutual building (today acting as an annex for the nearby museum) was much more flexible in its interpretation of the architectural motifs of the past. Its asymmetric massing, oversized entrance arch, and stretches of unadorned limestone marked the building as conspicuously modern despite its many ornate flourishes.

The sculptor Lee Lawrie (also known for the Art Deco decorative scheme at Rockefeller Center in New York) contributed much of the ornamental and sculptural program to the building, including elaborate relief panels and a polychrome cornice. Echoing ancient sculpture but rendered in a smooth moderne style, much of the ornament was meant to signify aspects of the insurance business: The cornice sculptures of owl, dog, pelican, and squirrel respectively stood for the attributes of wisdom, fidelity, charity, and frugality.

This entrance to the building is at Pennsylvania and Fairmount Avenues. (Photograph by G. Widman)

Detail of Market Street National Bank building, c. 1933

Built in 1931 and designed by the Philadelphia architectural firm Ritter and Shay, the Market Street National Bank is a representative example of the Art Deco style that characterized so many tall buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. The vibrant, multicolored decoration on the street-level façade and the building’s upper stories was rendered with modular architectural terra cotta components, which were both economical to produce and highly durable. Some of the ornamental designs referenced the Beaux-Arts tradition, with volutes, swags, and garlands playfully reinterpreting familiar classical forms, while other elements were more geometric, abstract, and explicitly modern.

The building shared its distinctive stair-step or ziggurat form with numerous other skyscrapers from the period; this was primarily the result of municipal laws intended to ensure access to light and air for the crowded streets below, but also provided opportunities for the designers to articulate the different masses of the tall building with inventive brickwork and other architectural ornament.

The building is located at Market and Thirteenth Streets, across from the northeast corner of City Hall.

“Art Deco details, upper stories,” Market Street National Bank Building, c. 1933. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Historic American Buildings Survey Collection, HABS PA,51-PHILA,484—2.

Hotel Traymore, Atlantic City, c. 1920

The Hotel Traymore was a large resort complex in Atlantic City, New Jersey, renovated and expanded in 1914–15 by the Philadelphia architect William L. Price and his partner M. Hawley McLanahan. Price was an outspoken advocate of the Arts and Crafts movement, helping to found two craft-focused art colonies in the Greater Philadelphia region, but from the early years of the twentieth century to his death in 1916 his own architectural practice increasingly incorporated explicitly modern materials and forms.

The Traymore was an important antecedent for Art Deco buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. It was an early example (along with Price & McLanahan’s other hotel projects nearby in Atlantic City) of the structural use of reinforced concrete, a technological achievement that enabled the hotel’s impressive size and paved the way for the massive skyscrapers of the Art Deco period. Likewise, its restrained, selective use of architectural embellishment—with decorative motifs mostly accreting around street level and upper stories—established a model approach for the ornamentation of tall buildings that many later designers would borrow. Despite the Traymore’s initial success, however, it was a victim of Atlantic City’s decline in the mid-twentieth century and was demolished by implosion in 1972.

Hotel Traymore, Atlantic City, c. 1920. Photograph by Irving Underhill. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-66870

Art Deco Building Locations

Philadelphia has dozens of examples of Art Deco design in skyscrapers and smaller buildings, with a concentration along or near Walnut and Chestnut Streets in the heart of the city. Among them are Market Street National Bank (1319 Market Street; built 1931), the Sun Oil Building (1608-1610 Walnut Street; built 1928), and the Architects Building at 121 S. Seventeenth Street, completed around 1930.

WCAU Building, 2016

Completed in 1931 by the architects Gabriel Roth and Harry Sternfeld, the WCAU building was the country’s first purpose-built headquarters for a radio station. Fittingly for the home of what was a relatively new communication medium at the time, the building’s design expressed a sense of technological virtuosity through its nontraditional forms and materials. The geometric motifs of the façade, including the distinctive “zig-zag” evident in other examples of Art Deco architecture, were rendered in brass, copper, and stainless steel, while the exterior cladding itself incorporated crushed glass that lent it an unusual “sparkle.”

Many of the new venues and businesses that flooded America’s cities in the 1920s and 1930s made use of the Art Deco idiom, charged with a spirit of newness that accompanied the rapid spread of technologies like electricity, telephones, aviation, and the personal automobile. A distributed infrastructure of theaters and cinemas, automats and eateries, and other commercial spaces helped foster the phenomenon that historians have termed “mass culture,” where the interwoven dynamics of accelerated consumption, industrial production, and widespread media visibility all contributed to major shifts in American lifestyles and cultural forms.

In an example of the enduring appeal of Art Deco, the WCAU Building, long owned by the Art Institute of Philadelphia,, was purchased in 2015 by Pearl Properties, which said it planned to rent three of the building's lower stories to Gap Inc. for a new Old Navy store. This photograph of the building at 1618-22 Chestnut Street is from February 2016. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia)

Related Topics

• Athens of America

Time Periods

• Twentieth Century to 1945
• Center City Philadelphia
• Arts of Wharton Esherick
• Painters and Painting
• Great Depression
• Office Buildings
• Percent for Art Programs

Related Reading

Benton, Charlotte, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood, eds. Art Deco, 1910–1939 . London: V&A Publications, 2003.

Breeze, Carla. American Art Deco: Architecture and Regionalism . New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

Donofrio, Mark Edward. “Preserving the Neighborhood Theaters of William Harold Lee.” M.A. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2010.

Dooley, David Warren. “The Geographic Diffusion of Art Deco Architecture in Delaware.” M.A. thesis, University of Delaware. 1999.

Gordon, John Stuart. A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery, 1920–1950 . New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press, 2011.

Hiesinger, Kathryn Bloom. Collecting Modern: Design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1876 . Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2011.

Hillier, Bevis. The World of Art Deco . Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1971.

Johnson, Stuart J. American Modern, 1925–1940: Design for a New Age . New York: Harry N. Abrams and American Federation of Arts, 2001.

Lesieutre, Alain. The Spirit and Splendour of Art Deco . New York and London: Paddington Press, 1974.

Meikle, Jeffrey L. Twentieth Century Limited : Industrial Design in America 1925-1939 , 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Thomas, George E. William L. Price: Arts and Crafts to Modern Design . New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.

Related Collections

Paul Philippe Cret Collection ; William L. and Walter F. Price Collection ; Price & McLanahan Collection ; Howell Lewis Shay Collection ; and Zantzinger, Borie and Medary Collection , The Athenaeum of Philadelphia , 219 S. Sixth Street, Philadelphia.

Raymond Loewy archive, 1903–1982 , Hagley Museum and Library , Hagley Museum and Library, 298 Buck Road East, Wilmington, Del.

Raymond Loewy papers , Library of Congress, Manuscript Division , 101 Independence Avenue SE, Washington, D.C.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives , 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia.

Sesquicentennial Exhibition Association Records, Philadelphia City Archives , 3101 Market Street, Philadelphia.

Harry Sternfeld Collection, Samuel Yellin Collection, and Zantzinger, Borie and Medary Collection , Architectural Archives , University of Pennsylvania, 102 Meyerson Hall, 220 S. Thirty-Fourth Street, Philadelphia.

Related Places

30th Street Station , 2955 Market Street, Philadelphia.

Former United States Post Office Main Branch (currently regional headquarters for the Internal Revenue Service), 2970 Market Street, Philadelphia.

Former Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance building (currently the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Perelman Building ), 2525 Pennsylvania Avenue, Philadelphia.

Suburban Station , Sixteenth Street and JFK Boulevard, Philadelphia.

Backgrounders

Connecting Headlines with History

• Wrecking ball will take all but the facade of Philly's Boyd Theater, (WHYY, March 14, 2014)
• Art Deco Style 1925-1940 (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission)
• Deco City? One of the Best (Hidden City Philadelphia)
• From Classic to Electric: Art Deco and American Business (PhillyHistory Blog)
• What Lies Within: The Dazzling Art Deco Interior of 1616 Walnut Street (Hidden City Philadelphia)
• Philly's Art Deco materpieces, mapped (Curbed)
• Let's Take One Last Look Back at Philly's "Art Deco Palace" (Curbed)
• Friends of the Boyd
• Perelman Building (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
• Art Deco (Victoria and Albert Museum)
• French Art Deco (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Art Deco Society of New York

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What is Art Deco Architecture?

• Written by Camilla Ghisleni | Translated by Tarsila Duduch
• Published on November 18, 2021

Art Deco architecture derives from a style of visual arts of the same name that emerged in Europe in the 1920s, which also influenced the movie industry, fashion, interior design, graphic design, sculpture, painting, and other forms of art, in addition to architecture. The milestone of this style was the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris in 1925, from which it took its name.

Just like in the many fields influenced by this style, Art Deco architecture combines modern design with traditional elements such as exquisite craftsmanship and luxurious materials including jade, lacquer, and ivory. As a successor to the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements, Art Deco was also influenced by the abstract and geometric forms of Cubism, the bright colors of Fauvism, and the exoticized crafts and styles of countries such as China, Japan, and Egypt. The decorative aspect and the compositional arrangements also derive from Beaux-Arts architecture , through symmetry, straight lines, hierarchy in the floor plan distribution, and facades divided into base, shaft, and capital (Classical tripartite division) - although this time with more rational volumes and the occasional use of ornaments. It was a lavish mixture of styles that was embraced by the wealthy post-war bourgeoisie.

From the 1930s, however, the style began to establish a closer dialogue with industrial manufacturing and the possibility of mass production. During this period, Art Deco becomes more moderate and sober, incorporating materials such as concrete and stainless steel. The most iconic works of the style emerged at this time, including the Chrysler Building , the Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building , all in New York , introducing a new language to the skyscrapers that changed the city's skyline, reflecting a new modern and technological society. These buildings reveal some of the most striking characteristics of the style, which contributed to its consolidation in the history of architecture. Among them is the use of reinforced concrete, straight lines, clean rectangular shapes, terraced buildings, sharp angles, chevrons, and zigzags. The latter is a striking feature of the Chrysler Building's elevators and shows that the patterns spread beyond the façade into the interior spaces.

Besides the New York skyscrapers of the early 20th century, the city of Rio de Janeiro also featured several notable examples of this style, such as the Carlos Gomes Theater and the Central do Brasil Station, with its staircases, stained glass windows, signs, among other elements. The sculpture of Christ the Redeemer, one of Rio's most famous landmarks, is an Art Deco piece and is considered to be the largest sculpture of this style to date.

The fine line between the search for simplicity, especially when compared to previous movements, and the extravagance of its forms, was considered by many experts as a paradox. However, Art Deco architecture assumed an important role in history by representing the process of modernization of the urban landscape, balancing the elements of the past with new geometric configurations and ornamental references.

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Photo Essay: Britain’s finest Art Deco buildings

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Originating at the dawn of the 20th century in Vienna and Paris, Art Deco soon spread to the rest of Europe, setting off the public imagination with an expressive amalgam of influences that ranged from American classicism and cubism to Oriental motifs. In this Photo Essay , we present highlights from a new work by architectural historian Elain Harwood, Art Deco Britain: Buildings of the Interwar Years , published in association with The Twentieth Century Society, which documents how the style took shape in the UK.

Eltham Palace, London SE9 Eltham Palace is a romantic hideaway, accessible only across a medieval bridge and moat. Formerly Edward IV’s 15th-century great hall, the palace was acquired by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld, who combined its remains with their new house, offering romantic interpretations of the Swedish and Italian aesthetics influential at the time. Two wings are linked by a near-circular entrance hall with Australian blackbean panelling, where a geometric rug and white leather furniture were recreated in 1999 by English Heritage.

The painted ceiling beams in the drawing-room reflect traditional Swedish designs. More sophisticated is Peter Malacrida’s dining room, with aluminium and black marble decoration featured in a Greek key and fluted surround to the electric fire, and black and silver lacquer doors. Most luxurious are the private bathrooms, Virginia’s with marble panels and gold-plated taps set in a gold mosaic niche below a bust of the goddess Psyche. All this luxury was little used; the Courtaulds travelled extensively before the Second World War, and emigrated in 1944.

San Remo Towers, Bournemouth, Dorset A brochure in 1940 described San Remo Towers as ‘a magnificent block of 164 superior flats, £96–260 per annum rental’. The deal included central hot water and heating, a telephone service and ‘auto vac’ cleaning system, a resident manager, porter, daily maid, boot cleaning and window cleaning services. There was a residents’ club with a reading room, card room, billiard room and library, and children’s recreation and games rooms. Kiosks in the entrance lobbies sold convenience items like tobacco and took orders for the local tradespeople, while the fifth-floor restaurant offered à la carte meals for 38s a week, or simpler dinners at 2s/6d each. Hector O. Hamilton, the architect, had worked in America, so understood planning for such services and included a grand underground car park accommodating 130 vehicles, all unusually ambitious for the Guildford developers Armstrong Estates. Hamilton’s long-term residence in America, perhaps, also determined the building’s Spanish Mission style. The flats are set in five blocks, five storeys high, each finished with white render, patterned brickwork and pantile roofs, with coloured faience to the topmost windows and balconies, and to the entrance doors, each set between barley-sugar columns.

St Olaf House, London SE1 Started as a classical design project, St Olaf House was stripped back by the architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel to express the open ground-floor (required for car parking), the sloping windows of a rooftop drawing office and the luxury of the boardroom and directors’ common room that dominate the river frontage.

The windows were originally gilded and are angled to give the best views and, rather functionally, to be able to open away from the prevailing wind. But what really impresses is the quality of decoration throughout the building, including staircase balustrades, granolithic floor patterns and the lift doors. The double-height boardroom has pilasters and coffered beams in grey scagliola, while the common room is panelled with veneered hardwoods. Goodhart-Rendel even designed the furniture, made by Betty Joel, which survived into the 1980s. E. Pellicci’s Café, London E2 Bolotonno Fabrizi acquired a confectioners’ shop here in 1908, and passed it to the Pellicci family in 1915. Mrs Elide Pellicci turned it into a café in 1939, but the new facade of lemon yellow Vitrolite and a claustrophobically small yet jazzy interior – its walls featuring cocktail shaker-shapes in panels of contrasting marquetry – are said by her family to date only from 1946. The years immediately after the Second World War were the heyday of the Italian café, particularly in London, where they offered a way of stretching limited rations (controls continued until 1954). The tiny café, now run by Elide’s son Nevio, is encrusted with many generations of family photos and international awards.

Wolverton, Silver End, Essex Initially designed for factories, metal windows found extensive use in domestic contexts when a timber shortage during the 1920s meant alternatives had to be found. Metal window business owner Francis Crittall built a model village that showcased his product, where Wolverton house served one of the managers of Crittall’s factory, and was later beautifully restored by the current owners. Built of rendered brick, its central staircase window in an otherwise blind upper floor is reminiscent of Peter Behrens’s New Ways, Northampton (1925), acknowledged as Britain’s first Modern Movement house, but its door and the balcony feature a ‘flying V’ motif that is quintessential Art Deco.

The Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, Wales This strikingly modern hall with golden panelled ceiling was named after the producer of the artwork adorning its walls. Commissioned by Lord Iveagh of the House of Lords in 1924, Frank Brangwyn, a muralist and war artist, he produced a set of decorative fantasies depicting ‘various Dominions and parts of the British Empire’, an unusually humane interpretation based on extensive travels and studies at London Zoo. Although originally criticised by the commissioner for the radiant colour that was being revived during the epoch of Art Deco, Brangwyn’s painted panels were met with acclaim and found a new civic home in Swansea in the mid-1930s. Like other public interiors in the Guildhall complex, The Brangwyn Hall remains remarkably intact, serving as a statement of civic grandeur.

Art Deco Britain  by Elain Harwood is published by Batsford in collaboration with Twentieth Century Society. Photographs by Elain Harwood.

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Essay: The influence of Art Deco

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Art Deco is the of the ‘modern’ 20th-century style which was a movement in the decorative arts and architecture. The style came to Worldwide during the inter-war years, in the 1920s and developed into to the main style in Western Europe and the United States during the 1930s. Art Deco included all types art, from fine arts, interior design, architecture to fashion, textiles, film and photography. The Art Deco name comes from the exhibition, which was organised in 1925 in Paris, named L’Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes where the style was first presented. According to the article (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2003) many countries from all around the Europe and beyond, participated in the exhibition, including Poland, Hungary, Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Netherlands and USSR. However, other countries for instance USA or Germany did not participate, because of their own reasons. During the seven-month run exhibition, there were presented thousands of designs from different nations. Over sixteen million visitors participated in the exhibition(Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000). The exhibition was dedicated to showcase the interior design, architecture, fashion, perfumes and jewelry. The purpose of of the exposition was to promote French pre-eminence of French taste and in the production of luxury goods. The exhibition played the most important role in promoting the Art Deco style. According to Bevis Hillier’s words (Art Deco of the 20s and 30s, 1968, p. 13), Art Deco has been defined as “an assertively modern style, developing in the 1920s and reaching its high point in the thirties …; it was a classical style in that, like neo-classicism but unlike Rococo or Art Nouveau, it ran to symmetry rather than asymmetry, and to the rectilinear rather than the curvilinear; it responded to the demands of the machine and of new materials … [and] requirements of the mass production.” What is more Encyclopædia Britannica Online (2016) points out, that the most important features of the style are “simple, clean shapes, often with a streamlined look; ornament that is geometric or stylizes from representational forms; and unusually varied, often expensive materials”. In spite of the fact that Art Deco items were mass-produced just once in the while, the features of the style showed that the designers were inspired by modern machines and by the design quality of made thanks to those machines, objects, for instance: simplicity, symmetry, planarity, and repetitive elements.

The biggest design influences on Art Deco had Art Nouveau, National traditions and Avant Garde.  Art Nouveau was adapted to Art Deco by nature motifs, but it regrets its organic shapes, colours such as chrome and black, and pastel for bolder materials. When it comes to national traditions, they were applied to the patterns which were usually geometric, stylised and simplified what was easy to modernise. Avant Garde which was represented by movements, such as Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, De Stijl, Constructivism and Suprematism had also a powerful impact on Art Deco style. Geometric and abstract forms were very quick to transform for designers. Through to use of the clean lines and minimal decoration the Art Deco style was also connected with the Modernism. Among the most popular motifs are animals, the human figure, flowers, plants and abstract geometric decorations. Art Deco, which was originally born in France, quickly spread to other European countries and America until the beginning of the Second World War.  According to the journal (Striner, 1990) movement had a big influence on Interior Design. It was the first style which represented the decoration which reflected new materials and technologies. The Art Deco’ concept was to use unique materials such as stainless steel, mirrors, shiny fabrics, aluminium, chrome, lacquer, inlaid wood, sharkskin or zebra skin instead of the traditional ones. The designers in that period used metallic and harder materials. The chosen materials were aimed to reflect the modern age which was introduced after First World War . The unique combined materials created the contrasts which were very fashionable at that time. Regarding the colour themes used in interiors during the 1920s and 1930s, they were mostly composed of cool, metallic shades, for instance: gold, silver, charcoal grey, metallic blue and platinum as a predominating colour. Nevertheless, the black and white were also very trendy colour theme during that period. It was mostly used for floors, wallpapers and checkerboard tiles. Bold use of colour, which was inspiration from the fashion for the exotic, was primarily an essential characteristic of the Interior Design. Art Deco furniture were often made of expensive and very luxurious materials, for instance, leather, zebrawood, tortoise-shell and Macassar ebony. Moreover, glass polished metal and mirrors were visible in many interior design projects. The furniture was often finished by curved edges, clean lines and geometric shapes. Nevertheless, after the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and succeeding Depression, the materials palette changed. The mentioned events had a destructive impact, which had affected on many European designers on the luxury market. That was a reason for increasing demand for inexpensive consumer goods which became more focused on the aesthetic linked with industrial production and new materials rather than in handcraft practice. The expensive materials such as exotic woods, sharkskin and ivory have been replaced for the cheaper materials like aluminium, chromed steel, coloured glass, mirror and the new plastics, for example, Catalin and Bakelite, which became the favoured materials of the 1930s. The inexpensive versions of the materials were adapted to the surfaces typical for Art Deco design in the 1920s but because of the price, they were suitable for the mass production.

According to Encyclopedia of Interior Design, in the 1920s, Art Deco was the main new style which was dominant among the other styles for commercial buildings in West Europe. Art Deco, after an exhibition in 1925, was linked with glamour and luxury. One of the most ambitious and extravagant buildings presented at the Exposition in 1925 in Paris, was Hotel d’un Collectionneur. The person who designed it was a French designer named Pierre Partout. He planned the construction of the pavilion, with the mysterious oval room, and with the meeting point, Grand Salon. The Hotel consists of suite rooms, which were designed by the a French furniture maker Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann who brought together many artists and designers who were the members of the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs (founded in 1901). Ruhlmann was the leading interior designer in that period in France. He was combing other styles with Art Deco luxury. The idea which he evolved was to hang a massive chandelier in the Grand Salon of the Pavillon, additionally, he covered the walls with silk, which was boldly patterned and topped by a classic entablature. The furniture in the room, which he designed were created from 18th-century pieces and centered with very luxurious Macassar ebony. Ruhlmann was an interior design who designed in extravagant style. He was inspiring by the proportions in the classical architecture and he used exclusive and unique materials, for instance, ivory, tortoise-shell, lizard-skin, shagreen and exotic hardwoods. The hotel is identified with rich use of colours, extravagant decoration and with the elegant improvement of the traditional forms and techniques. What is more, according to the journal many critics claim that the Grand Salon at the Hotel d’un Collectionneur is the biggest achievement of Art Deco in France. Some of the work become Art Deco icons, especially the Jean Dupas’ painting ‘Donkey and Hedgehog’ cabinet.

The Art Deco style in Britain was mostly visible in interior design and was limited to the restaurants, hotels, theaters. The second example of the Art Deco within interior design in Europe is Strand Palace Hotel in London. The hotel was renovated in 1929 by Olivier P. Bernard, the British architect, and designer. According to the history of the hotel, it is one of the most successful examples of Art Deco movement in London. The main, large entrance was designed and built by Oliver who used traditional and new materials and made modern use of glass and lighting. The lighting played a very important role in the development of inter-war interior. In the Strand Palace Hotel, the pale pink marble was used to cover the walls in the entrance foyer and the floor was clad with the limestone, what created the kaleidoscope which reflected the light from the balustrades and columns. Moreover, these surrounded balustrades, door, and columns forced the light, with the use of diamond shapes created a futuristic feeling, that was because the were made of the chromed steel, mirrored and translucent molded glasses. Oliver used the lighting as an element of the architecture.

The influence of Art Deco in America was also highly influential and extensive. According to the (Study Guide Journal vam, nwm jak to napisac) the main influence on the Art Deco in America had the 1925 exhibition. Even though the USA were notable absentees, many American designers visited the exhibition. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1926 organised an exhibition of furniture which has been bought at the Exposition in Paris 1925.  Streamlining, which features are strong curves and clean lines, quickly became a phenomenon in America. It was used for decorative and symbolic intention, in order to increase the consumption. American designers applied it to design the architecture, cars and furniture but also to mass-produced products for example radios and refrigerators. The design of the products was based on contoured shells, what helped in the process of mechanization of mass-production and new materials for example plastic.  In the 1930s, in order to stimulate consumption and reach new customers, manufactures hit by Depression got inspired by iconic elements of Art Deco style and transformed the look for the mass production, what was a cheap way to produce the products. In 1939,  while in Europe was taking place a Second World War, Americans organised the New York Worlds Fair, during which many important designers of that period presented their work. It also included the different directions in design which had been developed in these two decades.

The Art Deco style was mostly used for the design of hotels and skyscrapers. Two of the most popular and important buildings, built in Art Deco style in America, are The New York’s Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. The New York’s Chrysler Building was designed in 1930 by William van Alen for automobile corporation. According to book the Chrysler building has the most characteristic construction in the New York. The characteristic feature of that skyscraper is its spiked top, made of stainless-steel and stepped setbacks. Both of these elements were ornamented with details which were designed to look like headlights and radiator caps of the vehicle produced by Chrysler. The building includes Alen’s Art Deco interiors of elevators, stairs and lobbies. The lobby was clad with mixes of red marble with different hues with chrome and wood, the elevators door, designed in a very unique way, veneered with light amber and dark brown woods, create the modern technology look. Most of the design in the building were made as an inspiration of automobiles.

To conclude, Art Deco was a globally known, popular style which was very influential during the 1920s and 1930s. It was applied to many areas of design and was used in the design of consumer products, for example, furniture or automobiles. It had also a big influence on interior design, architecture, fashion design, graphic arts, industrial design and cinema. Despite the fact, it started to wane during World War II, in the beginning of the 1960s, the interests of that style renewed. Although the style went out of fashion in most places during World War II, beginning in the late 1960s there was a newer interest in Art Deco design. Art Deco was the response for the consumers needs during the inter-war period, it represented the modern life and its development in order to escape from convention. Nevertheless, the designers were still able to adapt national and local identities by using forms and domestic decorations. According to **** Art Deco style was first presented on Paris Exposition in 1925, the event which summarized everything and brought the era of Art Deco till the end might be the World’s Fair 1939 in New York. In the 21st century, Art Deco is continuing to be a source of inspiration in such areas as decorative art and fashion and jewelry design.

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