art deco style

art deco style

Exploring the Influence and Evolution of Art Deco Style

1. Introduction to Art Deco Style

Art Deco symbolizes both luxury and modernity. It is applied to compare the designs produced during the high era of the 1920s and the 1930s with the underlying designs that directly emerged from the post-World War I 1910s. Significantly inspired by Cubism and other modern art movements, and influenced by the ‘primitive’ art of Africa, Ancient Egypt, and Hollywood, Art Deco is a visual style marked by its use of pure forms and rich, decorative surface patterns. Pioneering architects led the transition from the exotic manner of the 1920s to the severe style sometimes evident during the economically constrained 1930s. Social, cultural, and technical innovations deeply stimulated structural and decorative designs inaugurated during the period. We have collected here a selection of the most striking and influential elements of Art Deco style to narrate the history and meaning of the time.

Art Deco design is both a significant style that defined the early 20th century and an important influence on a multitude of modern designs that continue to maintain relevance to the present day. From fashion and cinema to architecture and advertising, Art Deco style continues to inform an expanding number of visual works that, together and at an increasingly accelerating pace, are creating a persuasive twenty-first-century interpretation. The resultant large body of innovative design models therefore embodies a design potential that exhibits opportunity and novelty.

2. Key Characteristics and Elements of Art Deco

By 1925, trendsetting architects and furniture designers were employing new, geometry-derived contours, with a strong vertical emphasis. Corticalism, originally applied to painting, had grown to be the dominant decorative influence. Simple, sometimes agitated curves, counterpointed by zigzags, right angles, and stepped forms, suggest reaching ever higher, analogous to the hope and wish of a people beginning to find itself as an individual world leader. On the other side of the Atlantic, modern skyscrapers, emphasizing height above all other considerations, were being constructed. The “new” technology of steel skeleton supports had allowed architects to design to the limits of physics. These towers, particularly in New York City, were starting to display their own distinctive visual vocabulary. They played with the observer’s perspective, presenting viewers with juxtaposed stages ever higher and ankles, U turns atop flat fronts, and curving penultimate stories, to suggest towering columns reaching up to the heavens. The visual dialog developed. The urban design of American cities would soon begin to reflect this new movement. The capacity to research and document urban development was becoming ubiquitous as more and more buildings were constructed, and more and more urban areas were home to people. High-rise structures became familiar in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, and other North American cities. When old was destroyed these new structures emerged, to change the nature of the city that street and building aligned, giving them an intimacy with their observer. With vertical lines, glittering exteriors of stone, polished marble, metallic grillwork, peaky and pubnost architectural details – all were uniquely modern in their view. Their decoration reflected the centrality of this art form to the city street, the place where people work, play, and see the world as they move about. The tactility of these buildings often would respond to flowage, to placed feet, hands, and backswaddle. Traffic would bear daily witness to success in the form of vast array and populace built to bring, or sponsor of nature’s blaze and fare. The development has been shipbuilding and decoration, driven by a diversely motivated and financed group.

Art Deco was the last of the design movements of the first quarter of the 20th century. It is often seen as an amalgam of many such movements that preceded it, taking the best from each, blending and redefining the vocabulary in the hope of eliminating the flaws it saw. The abstract qualities of European art movements such as Cubism with its harsh lines and angles of geometric shapes, and the bold bright colors of Orphism could hardly be considered exclusive to the applied arts. The abstract, yet deliberately obtuse and clustered design that was expressed in ironwork, cabinetry, stained glass, and virtually all applied arts of the day, became an altogether separate definition of the movement when it was taken up by a series of tall structures in the late twenties and early thirties. These objects were an extension of the dynamic visual tension being expressed in painting and sculpture. For the first time, they imposed an abstract design on the landscape, a forceful influence on living and working environments that still survives.

3. Art Deco in Architecture and Interior Design

One of the undisputed monuments of Art Deco style is the Chrysler Building in New York, by architect William Van Alen. It was designed and built during the very few years when the style was at its apex (1928-1930) and created an indelible image of progress, power, and inherent freedom of design and technology, while glaring oddly against traditional New York skyscrapers and culminating an atmosphere of vertical competition in downtown Manhattan. The building introduces several new concepts from Art Deco, formerly seen only on French liners, commercial or film posters, and very few interiors but not on an actual skyscraper. These are the geometric abstract forms, as in the tower which comes directly from Arts Moderne, the Chrysler logo reinterpreted in narrow brick masonry, the Mexican art references in the spandrels and “Eagen Mezanine Exposition” above the entrance, the soaring hood on the top and their Art Deco references in the granite and terracotta parts (stylized clouds and radiator ornaments) which are a common trait of the commercial skyscrapers of the ‘20s and the ‘30s.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, numerous changes in the world, particularly those related to industrialization and war, radically transformed architectural and artistic pursuits. The ancient and rather stifling traditions in the world of art were given a powerful blow by the very World War I. In the first quarter of the 20th century, this change was brewing and became evident and dominant in the next 15 years or so. This was a period when basic shifts in values, both material and metaphysical, snowballed, producing visible changes in manners, morals, and the arts. And this came through with even more vigor when war broke out in 1914. The war freed many artists, writers, thinkers, and poets from the academic attitudes of the past. There was a widespread break with established traditions and normal matters of historic development.

4. Art Deco in Fashion and Jewelry

Herms et Cie., under the direction of Gustave Frecourt, supervised the designing of the costumes which the house made for a series of artist balls given by Barbier and de Treville in 1788. Fauconier, whose imagination had never soared higher than the seventh century, did a complete about-face and began to revel in the Louis XVI motifs. The wherewithal to create both costumes and jewels was evolved from jasmine branches designed by Feuillatre in white satin sprinkled with artificial diamonds and pink satin blossoms of natural pearls. Fortunys creations, little urns of paper with opalescent sides, containing golden, the birds, I believe, that lay the delicate egg destined to become the costume worn by the artist, and as egg-shaped objects were to be the integral design motif of the production, informality in jewelry was the secret of happiness.

Theodore Foulk recalled that as director of the costume pageants at the last two Mardi Gras celebrations, the Louis XVI models and the various Mignonettes had giant mechanical figures which were greatly admired. Foulk also specialized in troupes and had a delightful series of pageants done with the Arcadian scenes. These presentations and others devoted to burlesque were mounted annually and were so compelling and clever as to be thoroughly enjoyable. Reve an artist, were in their day a very real inspiration to the designers of jewelry, particularly when a revival of eighteenth-century styles seemed going on. Important houses introduced entire lines of jewelry, vases, and other objets lus of porcelaine de Saxe with the famous double cross of film office.

5. Legacy and Contemporary Revival of Art Deco

The first significant attempt at a revival of the Art Deco period started to take place in the 1960s. The architectural restoration of Miami Beach by such notable architects as Morris Lapidus, Leonard Horowitz, and Normandy Plaza Hotel aimed at reviving interest in Deco architecture and inspired interest in the period in general. Former NFL linebacker and Las Vegas-based casino legend Steve Wynn bought the historic Desert Inn in 1978 and had three massive sculptures installed at the front of the hotel by David Hares, a renowned Art Deco/Retro designer. This was the start of a trend where Art Deco made a big comeback in the 1980s. This comeback coincided with increased interest in the visual and graphic arts of the period. Today, the style excites collectors again, and many of the auction prices for Art Deco items rival those of other designers of the time, such as Charles Mackintosh or Josef Hoffman. The best pieces are now held in museums and are enjoying steadily increasing valuations.

The first wave of Art Deco had run its course by the outbreak of World War II. The Second World War and the austerity ethos of the 1940s turned people’s minds away from indulging in luxury and celebrating modernity. Art Deco was replaced by social realism in the art world, and the fashion industry had to focus on more practical, responsible styles. The style was considered in bad taste, merely because it symbolized the previous era’s love affair with luxury and plenty. So after 1945, Art Deco’s popularity waned, and mass-produced objects of the style began to look embarrassing to their owners who switched to mid-century modernism. Art Deco style was regarded as gaudy and old-fashioned, and collectors who had hoarded Art Deco items were often relieved to see them go to second-hand stores. The old architecture became outdated and many “ugly” buildings were replaced by new high-rise office buildings.