art deco

art deco

Exploring the Influence and Evolution of Art Deco in the 20th Century

1. Introduction to Art Deco: Origins and Characteristics

Art Deco originated in a time of great excitement about the new Machine Age. This was a time before air travel, manned space flight, and television. Science was allowing man to do things he could once only dream of. Consequently, the images are quite frequently iconographical in a muscular way, which contrasts with the cool modernity of the machine. You will see images including ocean liners and speeding trains. Personal items such as cigarette cases, cocktail shakers, and women’s handbags, which would once have been of traditional design, were recreated in the modernistic European style. All were detailed and unique interpretations of this new design. Simple zigzags and blocks of vivid color characterized the new design. It was brought about by a wide set of cultural factors. Some argued that such design was appropriate only for the “Happy Few” and that such luxury was vulgarity.

Art Deco is a style which emerged during the 1920s and 1930s but continued to influence architecture and design up until the 1960s. The name “Art Deco” comes from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925. It was here that the new style first appeared. This style, while exuberant and frequently extravagant, was a revolutionary departure from what had gone before. Some of the characteristics of the new style were vastly different from those adopted in the past. The basic forms are streamlined and geometric, while the paper-thin detail is often magnificently sumptuous and jazzy.

2. Key Artists and Architects of the Art Deco Movement

One of the foremost French painters, Jean Dupas leaves behind an astonishing array of Art Deco artifacts such as posters, banknotes, magazine covers – to name just a few. His works had considerable influence in popularizing Art Deco. We shall also discuss the Art Deco movement in an overall context – bringing together notable architects and artists, as well as other influencers. This movement began in France just before French ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes’ discovery in 1925. Leaving an unforgettable mark, Art Deco was seen in so many regions and disciplines such as architecture, interior design, industrial and graphic design, fashion, textiles, as well as film. Its long-lasting influence is best documented in the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York City as well as the luxurious Art Deco junk sculpture that stretches along Miami’s South Beach. From post-war prosperity, Art Deco has enjoyed a substantial return in the past few years. It has recently been seen as a reaction to the minimalism ideology that has taken over in the field of design and aesthetics.

Dorothy Draper was an influential American interior designer who not only reformed the vocation of interior design but also had a great deal of impact on the workplace designs, the hospitality industry as well as the general field of design. She was the first of her kind in blending baroque and modern elements with striking colors in her designs.

William Van Alen is the legendary architect behind the amazing Chrysler Building in New York City. Invented during the Roaring Twenties, this unique Art Deco-style building was named after a rich businessman, Walter P. Chrysler. Employing stainless steel cladding, this geometric tower played an important role in launching the Art Deco movement as it battled to outdo the Eiffel Tower as the tallest building in the world.

While there is an endless list of important figures who contributed to the vast qualities of Art Deco, there are certain key artists and architects that have left an indelible fingerprint on Art Deco styles. Some of the most prominent Art Deco creators are William Van Alen, Dorothy Draper, and Jean Dupas.

3. Art Deco in Different Cultural Contexts

The Golden Age plate section offers a strong constructivist and modernist strain of Art Deco material, predominantly Russian in origin. The synthetic and sectioned plate section contains a strong strand of the more familiar Jazz Age Art Deco that is firmly rooted in the popular culture and then more broadly based material of the inter-war period in North America. The Latin plate section reflects an ocean-spanning cultural synergy at the dawn of civil aviation. The European Aspects plate section highlights a range of European national characteristics that surfaced as Art Deco infiltrated a selection of European cultural contexts. Finally, the last plate section, the Twentieth Century Theme, is conceptled by James Trilling, a master of the presentation of complex topics. He has selected material that should assist the reader in understanding Art Deco’s place in the evolution of art of the chosen period.

The evolution of Art Deco in different cultural contexts is both complex and varied. Ensuring that all that is understood about that evolution is included within this fragmented book, which comprises short, internally focused essays, is an ongoing challenge. The eight plate sections of the book reflect a wide range of the cultural contexts in which Art Deco was conceived and then flourished. A separate section addresses art and the applied arts from the continent that probably has the major claim to having been the birthplace of what would eventually become known as Art Deco: inter-war France.

4. Legacy and Contemporary Revival of Art Deco Design

In the post-World War II world, a fragmented audience began to appreciate the plethora of Art Deco architecture that still remained in the late 1960s and 1970s. This audience included experts in post-World War II modern architecture, whose valuing of the neoclassicism and revival of historical features sewn onto much of that era’s commercial and institutional work forced others to recognize that by retaining an overtly public sense of decoration and symbolism, Art Deco had attributed a sense of place and personality that these Modernist buildings often lacked.

In the fifty years after the movement’s heyday, Art Deco’s design legacy was grounded in individual masterpieces and adopted by architects who revived it without embracing the full pattern of architectural, planning, social program, and symbolic use of associated stylistic elements that had characterized its worldwide initial wave. This legacy was disseminated through the 1930s by selling Art Deco imagery to theater and exhibition goers who eschewed what they saw on display or onstage and then bought Practical or High Modernist designs in order to live. Through its existence in the everyday world of movies and exhibitions, the minority elite of design professionals who regarded Art Deco as one catholic incarnation of this non-vernacular world artistic aspiration came to regard it as a non-serious style of the ignorant minority, suitable for imitation and publication only in books of opposite models of contemporary taste of aspiring nouveau riche.