ART Deco is perhaps best understood as the style of an age ofextremes

Tag : Decorative Materials

It spanned the boom of the Roaring Twenties and the bustof the Depression-ridden 1930s. It was the style of the flappergirl and the factories of Fordism, the luxury ocean liner and theskyscraper, the fantasy world of Hollywood and the real world ofthe Harlem Renaissance. It could be deeply nationalistic and yet itspread like wildfire all over the world, dominating the skylines ofcities from New York to Shanghai and sheathing offices andfactories from London to Rio.
It presented a return to tradition and simultaneously celebratedthe mechanised, modern world. It embraced handcraft production andthe machine, exclusive works of high art and new products inaffordable materials. It affected all forms of design, from thefine and decorative arts to fashion, film, photography, transportand product design, and even reached beyond these to encompassliterature, music and dance. It was modern and could be seeneverywhere.
The plurality of Art Deco has made it hard to pin down. At thetime, it was known by several terms, including Jazz Moderne, ZigzagModerne and, simply, Moderne. The term Art Deco was not coineduntil the mid '60s but quickly gained currency as museum curators,collectors and the art market adopted it to refer to the inter-wardecorative modern style or styles.
There has, however, been little consensus as to what the termactually refers. Some writers have used the term to describe thehigh French style of the '20s, best exemplified by the luxury goodsand exquisite craftsmanship exhibited at the 1925 Paris ExpositionInternationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (theterm Art Deco is derived from the title of this exposition).
Others have allowed the term to encompass design of the '20s and'30s more broadly, while others have used it to refer purely to thestreamline style of America in the '30s.
Art Deco emerged in the years before 1914 in many of the citiesthat had embraced Art Nouveau and its development accelerated inthe aftermath of World War I. It drew life from many sources: theart of ancient civilisations and the avant-garde, the exoticism ofthe Ballets Russes, the motifs of French tradition and the imageryof the machine age. By the early '20s Art Deco had come torepresent the fast and new, the exotic and the sensual. It was astyle shaped in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by "all thenervous energy stored up and unexpended in the war". Andalthough its creators tended to avoid social idealism, the styleclearly reflected the tensions of wider cultural politics.Figuration became central to Art Deco practice and reclining nudes,dancing maenads or huntresses could be seen on everything fromtextile and poster designs to moulded glass and ceramic vessels.While Art Deco was a deeply eclectic style and designers drew frommany sources, none gave the style its distinct flavour more thanthe use of the exotic. The arts of Africa and the East proved arich source for both forms and materials, while recentarcheological discoveries fuelled a romantic fascination with theancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Meso-America.
The archeological discovery that gripped the public imaginationmost profoundly was that of the tomb of the boy-pharaoh,Tutankhamen. In November 1922 archeologist Howard Carter uncoveredan undisturbed tomb in the Valley of Kings near Luxor, one of themost important discoveries in archeological history. Funerary goodsincluded spectacular jewellery, chariots, furniture, alabastervessels and the fantastic gold mask and mummy cases.
These objects sparked enormous popular interest in all thingsEgyptian. It was, however, not so much the specific forms of theTutankhamen pieces that were incorporated into Art Deco design but,rather,
generic Egyptian imagery such as lotus flowers and buds, scarabsand hieroglyphics. The pylon and the pyramid were particularlypopular motifs and appeared in many forms of decorative arts frombookbinding to jewellery.
While Egyptian symbols and motifs were applied wholesale in ArtDeco, the ancient art of the Maya and Aztecs was adapted to createnew architectural and decorative forms. The most significant impactof these cultures was on the architecture of North America.Stepping and setbacks, in part derived from ancient ziggurats,became common features of the great skyscrapers of New York andother American cities.
Alongside traditional and exotic forms and motifs, designers alsolooked to the art of the avant-garde as a source of inspiration.Developments in the fine arts from French cubism and Orphism toItalian futurism and Russian constructivism provided designers witha fundamentally new and modern language of forms. These forms wereoften derived from the imagery of the mech-
anised world. For an artist such as Fernand Leger, the"excitement and exaltation depended upon a peculiarly intenseemotional reaction to mechanism, an emotion expressed ... throughhis specific sense of geometric form".
The movement towards geometry and abstraction that avant-garde artpresented was quickly assimilated into the Deco style. Forcontemporary artists and designers alike, geometry represented adistillation of the modern world. Through the use of pure formssuch as the circle, square or line, or through fragmenting form andplane, the dynamism of the modern world could be made into pattern.
At the 1925 Paris Exposition, Art Deco burst on to the world stage.The rules of the exposition demanded that only modern art anddesign was to be shown and, as a result, hundreds of Deco worksfrom many nations were displayed. Although the French exhibitsdominated, numerous countries participated including Britain,Japan, China, Austria, The Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia,Italy, Sweden, Denmark and Russia. The multifaceted nature of ArtDeco can been seen in the diversity of works exhibited. The Dutchexhibits, for example, revealed a fascination with the exotic andparticularly the crafts of the Dutch colony of Indonesia, while thePolish pavilion employed forms and motifs derived from folk art.For each of these countries the search for a national idiom wasparamount, and the development of Art Deco went hand in hand withthe exploration of native traditions.
The educative mission of previous World's Fairs was replaced with anew and thoroughly modern dream: redemption through consumption.Visited by more than 16 million people, the 1925 Paris Expositionestablished Art Deco as the most fashionable of modern styles andinfluenced a generation of designers and consumers worldwide. Theexhibition had demonstrated the success of Art Deco's premise thatmodern artistic ideas could be used to palliate -- even streamline-- the interface between the consumer and the workings of themarketplace. It established Art Deco as pragmatic and commercialrather than utopian: a style that addressed the individualism ofdesire.
The '30s witnessed the emergence of a new approach to design, thatalthough not invented in the US, took root and became identified asan American phenomenon. Responding to the demands of manufacturers-- hit hard by the Depression -- for a style that could be adaptedto the production of cheap new products, a group of Americandesigners developed an innovative approach to the process of designknown as styling.
Designers such as Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague andRaymond Loewy began to encase products in contoured shells, theforms of which were derived from transport machines including oceanliners, zeppelins, aeroplanes, cars and trains. The tubular,concave, convex, contoured and teardrop forms of streamlining couldbe created using mass production processes such as moulding,casting or dye stamping, and could be adapted for use in newmaterials such as plastics and aluminium. The visual appeal ofstreamlining was heightened by the sensual treatment of surfacefinish and the embellishing of objects with "speedwhiskers", decorative lines that followed the contours of thework to suggest movement and speed.
Streamlining marks the last phase of development of Art Deco. Itsforms were deeply symbolic and highly decorative and aimed tostimulate consumption rather than facilitate function. As such, itis part of the rich story of Art Deco, the twentieth century'sother modernism. The enormous success of Art Deco is, in part, dueto the fact that it proved the most malleable of styles. Without adefining doctrine or manifesto, the style fragmented, like a Cubistpainting, to envelop the modern world at its most dynamic points:ocean liners, skyscrapers, automobiles, jazz and Hollywood film.All elements of the style were bound together on a canvas of commonthemes: the decorative, the commercial, the fashionable, theindividualistic and the symbolic.
Art Deco reflects the plurality of the modern world, but more thanthis, Art Deco responds to the human need for pleasure and escape.Ironically, by celebrating the ephemeral, Art Deco succeeded increating a mass style of permanence. Infinitely permeable, it gavefree rein to the imagination and celebrated the fantasies, fearsand desires of people all over the world.
Then and now, Art Deco defies attempts to define or constrain it,to limit the dream of fantasy, glamour and escape to one place,people or time.
This is an edited extract from the catalogue for Art Deco:1910-1939, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, June28-October 5. Ghislaine Wood, from the Victoria and Albert Museum,London, curated the exhibition.