Art Deco

• 1. Introduction

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  Art Deco appeared in Paris in the 1910s, just before the guns of World War I fell silent, and within a decade it had spread to every corner of the world. It dressed skyscrapers and ocean liners, vacuum cleaners and diamond rings, in the same vocabulary of bold geometry and lavish material. Sixteen million people streamed through a single Paris exhibition dedicated to the style in 1925. Yet for decades, no one could even agree on what to call it. What forces pulled Art Deco into existence? How did a movement born in Parisian salons come to crown the New York skyline? And why did a style that stood for luxury and progress collapse almost overnight?

• 2. Contested Name

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  The phrase "Art Deco" did not appear in print until 1966, inside the title of an exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris: Les Annees 25: Art deco, Bauhaus, Stijl, Esprit nouveau. That same year, a newspaper article by Hillary Gelson in The Times used the term to describe the different styles on view. The name gained wider academic currency in 1968, when historian Bevis Hillier published the first major scholarly book on the subject, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s; he noted that art dealers were already using it informally, and he cited both the Times piece and an essay in Elle magazine from November 1967.

  Before Hillier's book fixed the label, the movement wore dozens of names. A researcher named Mike Hope catalogued the alternatives: Odeon Style, Jazz Moderne, Zigzag Moderne, Style Paquebot, Pueblo Deco, Federal Moderne, Depression Moderne, and dozens more. In France during its heyday the style was simply called style moderne or style contemporain. The multiplicity of names reflected a real fact: Art Deco was never a single coherent doctrine. It was a loose family of styles united by a shared appetite for geometric form, expensive materials, and the conviction that modernity was worth celebrating.

  The roots of the term itself run deeper than 1966. The distinction arts decoratifs appeared in France as early as the 1858 Bulletin de la Societe francaise de photographie. Le Figaro used the phrase objets d'art decoratifs in 1868. In 1875 the French government formally elevated furniture designers, glassworkers, textile makers, and other craftsmen to the legal status of artists. Hillier organized a follow-up exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1971, which he documented in his book The World of Art Deco, and by then the label was fixed.

• 3. Material Foundations

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  Reinforced concrete was the skeleton Art Deco wore beneath its ornament. Francois Coignet built the first concrete house in 1853 in the Paris suburbs. Joseph Monier introduced the idea of strengthening concrete with a mesh of iron rods in 1877. Auguste Perret took both ideas and ran with them: he built the first concrete garage in Paris in 1893, then an apartment building on rue Benjamin Franklin in 1903-04, and finally, between 1910 and 1913, the Theatre des Champs-Elysees at 15 avenue Montaigne. That theatre was the first landmark Art Deco building completed in Paris. One critic denounced it as the "Zeppelin of Avenue Montaigne," claiming it was a copy of Germanic taste from the Vienna Secession.

  The young Le Corbusier spent two years, from 1908 to 1910, working as a draftsman in Perret's studio, absorbing the grammar of concrete construction before he became the movement's most abrasive critic. Henri Sauvage built a parallel concrete apartment at 7, rue Tretaigne in 1904, and between 1925 and 1928 he redesigned the facade of La Samaritaine department store in Paris in the new style.

  New methods for producing plate glass gave architects much larger, stronger windows at lower cost. Mass-produced aluminium opened up lightweight building frames, window frames, and furniture. Perret pioneered the practice of covering concrete exteriors with ceramic tiles, serving both as protection and decoration. These were not aesthetic choices made in isolation: they were the direct result of industrial processes that had not existed a generation earlier. The building that brought them together, the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, employed stainless steel as both its spire and its famous gargoyles, which were modelled after radiator cap ornaments.

• 4. The 1925 Exposition

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  From April to October of 1925, a site of 55 acres in central Paris hosted the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. The site ran from the Grand Palais on the right bank to Les Invalides on the left bank, along both banks of the Seine. Fifteen thousand exhibitors from twenty countries filled it. Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the new Soviet Union all sent work. Germany was excluded because of post-war tensions. The United States, misunderstanding the purpose of the show, declined to participate. Sixteen million visitors attended over seven months.

  The rules were strict: no historical styles were permitted, only modern work. The main goal was to promote French manufacturers of luxury furniture, porcelain, glass, metalwork, and textiles. Every major Paris department store had its own pavilion, as did prominent designers. The exposition also carried a secondary mission: promoting goods from French colonies in Africa and Asia, including ivory and exotic woods.

  Two pavilions stood apart from the lavish decoration surrounding them. The Soviet Union's pavilion and Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau both had plain white walls and no ornament. They were among the earliest examples of modernist architecture on display anywhere. The Hotel du Collectionneur, by contrast, was one of the most popular attractions: it showcased the furniture of Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann alongside Art Deco fabrics, carpets, and a painting by Jean Dupas. The exposition did not resolve the tension between ornamental luxury and functional modernism. It exposed it, and that tension would define the movement's final decade.

• 5. Steel, Glass, and Concrete Towers

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  Detroit's Guardian Building opened in 1929, designed by Wirt C. Rowland, and was the first building in the world to use stainless steel as a decorative element. The Guardian Building was immediately dubbed the "Cathedral of Commerce." One year later, the Chrysler Building rose to seventy-seven floors in Manhattan, the work of William Van Alen. Its stainless steel spire and radiator-cap gargoyles made it a giant advertisement for Chrysler automobiles, as the source explicitly frames it. The lobby was decorated with Art Deco symbols expressing modernity. The Empire State Building by William F. Lamb followed in 1931, and Raymond Hood's RCA Building, now 30 Rockefeller Plaza, in 1933.

  Across the Hudson, Newark acquired its own cluster of Art Deco towers: the New Jersey Bell Headquarters, completed in 1929 and designed by Ralph Thomas Walker; the Lefcourt Building, completed in 1930 by Frank Grad; and the National Newark Building, completed in 1933 by John H. and Wilson C. Ely. John Cotton Dana, the head of the Newark Public Library at the time, remarked that these skyscrapers transformed Newark from a "huge, uncouth and unthinking industrial Frankenstein monster into a place of refinement."

  Movie palaces brought Art Deco to mass audiences. Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood opened in 1922, drawing on ancient Egyptian imagery. Radio City Music Hall in New York opened in 1932, originally as a theatrical performance space, quickly converted to a cinema seating 6,015 people. Donald Deskey designed its interior using glass, aluminum, chrome, and leather. The Grand Rex in Paris opened in the same year with a tower that made it the largest cinema in Europe at the time, behind only the 6,000-seat Gaumont-Palace, which ran from 1931 to 1973.

• 6. Fashion, Jewelry, and the Body

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  Paul Poiret introduced draping to fashion, cutting clothing along straight lines with rectangular motifs. He abandoned the corseted silhouette of the previous era in favour of structural simplicity. Coco Chanel carried the transition further, popularizing sporty, casual chic. The Flapper became the era's defining female type in popular imagination: short hair in a bob, cocktails, public smoking, and late-night dancing at clubs and cabarets.

  Jewellers worked to loosen the dominance of diamonds over fine jewellery. In the 1920s and 1930s, designers including Rene Lalique and Cartier introduced colourful gemstones, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires alongside less expensive materials such as enamel, glass, horn, and ivory. Platinum replaced gold in many settings because it was stronger and more flexible. At the 1925 Exposition, many diamonds were cut into the form of tiny rods or matchsticks. The asscher cut was the first diamond cut ever to be patented.

  Gerard Sandoz was only 18 when he began designing jewellery in 1921, creating pieces that evoked the smooth, polished surfaces of modern machinery. Raymond Templier produced silver earrings that looked like miniature skyscrapers. Jean Dupas painted the picture above the fireplace in the Maison du Collectionneur at the 1925 Exposition; his murals also appeared prominently in the decor of the ocean liner SS Normandie. Cassandre designed the celebrated poster of the SS Normandie in 1935, one of the best-known works of Art Deco graphic art. Paul Colin became famous for his posters of American singer and dancer Josephine Baker. Rapidly changing clothing fashions drove jewellery innovation at every turn: sleeveless dresses demanded bracelets, short hair demanded elaborate earrings, and women smoking in public created a market for ornate cigarette cases and ivory cigarette holders.

• 7. Decline and Survival

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  The French Union of Modern Artists was founded in 1929, and its members attacked Art Deco directly. The group included architects Pierre Chareau, Francis Jourdain, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Le Corbusier; the Irish designer Eileen Gray; the French designer Sonia Delaunay; and jewellers Georges Fouquet and Jean Puiforcat. They argued that fine craftsmanship and expensive materials made Art Deco the exclusive property of the wealthy. Le Corbusier's famous formulation was blunt: a house was simply "a machine to live in."

  The Great Depression, which began in the United States in 1929 and reached Europe soon after, did the modernists' work for them. Wealthy clients who could afford Ruhlmann cabinets, which cost more than an average house, became rare. Even the Ruhlmann firm eventually resorted to producing furniture in series rather than as individual hand-made pieces. The last major Art Deco buildings erected in Paris were the Museum of Public Works by Auguste Perret, the Palais de Chaillot by Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, Jacques Carlu, and Leon Azema, and the Palais de Tokyo, all from the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Those buildings faced the grandiose pavilion of Nazi Germany, designed by Albert Speer, across the plaza.

  After World War II, the International Style pioneered by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe became the dominant architectural language worldwide. A handful of Art Deco hotels were built in Miami Beach after the war, giving that city the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture anywhere in the world. Bevis Hillier's writings helped spark a modest academic revival of interest in the 1960s. Preservation efforts in the United States and Europe began in the 1970s, and many buildings were restored and repurposed. Postmodern architecture, which arrived in the 1980s, shared Art Deco's appetite for purely decorative features, and the style has continued to influence contemporary fashion, jewellery, and product design ever since.