Styles: Art Deco

According to James Laver, the British historian of women’s fashions, the same dress will be “indecent” if worn ten years before its time, and “daring” if worn a year before, “smart” the year of its coming of age, and “hideous” ten years after. But it will become “amusing” 30 years after its vintage year, and ultimately it may become “romantic” or even “beautiful.” The same sort of pattern, Laver maintains, can be traced in interior decoration and design. He may be right.

The artifacts and accouterments of the years between the two World Wars, from jewelry to architectural decoration, are now being rediscovered in much the same fashion that Art Nouveau was a decade or so ago. The Cubist-patterned rugs and lacquered sideboards mother threw out daughter eagerly buys in thrift shops. The tubular lamps and muscular lobby murals that embarrassed board chairmen ten years ago are now sought by youthful cultists and even a few museums. Somewhere along the way, the style acquired a name: Art Deco.

Craft and the Machine. Some admirers of the period value its creations for their sentimental value and assemble Mickey Mouse watches or Coca-Cola trays. More discerning buyers search for pieces of intrinsically good design. At its best, the style marks the first concentrated attempt to come to grips with the aesthetic challenges of the machine age.

Interior decorators, furniture designers, makers of fine glass, ceramics and fabrics sought to tame the new severities of the Bauhaus. They produced work that did not belie its mass-produced origin, yet sometimes possessed the ease and livability of an earlier, less industrial age. While the style of the day was mechanical, some of its most gifted designers, particularly in the 1920s, were craftsmen who produced signed, custom-designed work for a luxury market. Many were French: Silversmith Jean Puiforcat, Furniture Designer Jacques Ruhlmann, Glassmakers Rene Lalique and Maurice Marinot. In the U.S., Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes designed costume jewelry, radio consoles and jukeboxes.

Curves and Angles. Materials and objects proved only variously susceptible to the sensibility of the age. Cut glass, perfume flasks or a bubbly blue glass Steuben amphora look as pristine and crisp today as they did when Gertrude Lawrence was taking her first bows. Ceramie platters with insipid doe-eyed female heads and statuettes of languid girls on the other hand, are likely to be valued only by aficionados of kitsch. Certain themes and color schemes predominated: outrageous colors prompted by Léon Bakst’s Ballet Russe sets; Egyptian motifs and Aztec patterns.

In its heyday, the style was simply called “modernist” or “Moderne.” But Clothes Designer Lewis Winter, one of the style’s leading collectors, makes a distinction between Deco and Moderne. From 1918 to 1925, when Paris held a mammoth International Exposition of Decorative Arts, the style was more Deco, which he defines as graceful, rococo and curvilinear. From 1925 until 1939, the look modified into Moderne, which was chunkier and more geometric, as in a silver tea service designed by Britain’s Charles Boyton. In Winter’s living room, a black and gold painted panel for a post-office frieze by Lee Lawrie, the artist who designed many bas-reliefs for Rockefeller Center, exemplifies the WPA mood militant of Moderne.

Artists Stanley Landsman and Roy Lichtenstein are also devotees of the period. Landsman collects slender “green-ies,” a kind of metal figurine usually portraying a modish nymphet in an affected pose, which were popular as a decoration atop the family radio console. In his current show at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, Lichtenstein displays a series of what he calls “modern sculptures,” whose source he proudly admits is his own extensive library of Art Deco. Done in sleek brass, they look as if they should be holding back the crowds at Radio City Music Hall. Another indication of the era’s popularity is the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition of the twenties’ top cartoonist, John Held Jr.

As the interest in Art Deco grows, some collectors are beginning to worry that prices for vintage items will soar. In some respects, they have less to worry about than did fanciers of Art Nouveau. Because so many of its designs were originally intended for mass production, Art Deco has proved singularly easy to copy. Manhattan’s fashion industry has already begun to produce chunky, silver-and-jade Art Deco earrings, belts and pins. Some of the best Art Deco can be enjoyed by any devotee, without cost, simply by contemplating the elevator doors, grilles and mailboxes of such structures as Manhattan’s Chrysler Building.

Like camp, Art Deco is an acquired taste—and not everyone wants to acquire it. Part fad, part cultivated eccentricity, it will survive in a scattering of artifacts. But not even its greatest admirers would commend it as a model of form for the future.