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Art Deco
Art Deco is an elegant style of decorative art, furniture design and architecture which began as a
Modernist reaction against the
ArtNouveau style.
It is characterized by the use of crisp, symmetrical geometric forms.
One of the classic Art Deco images is that of 1930s-era skyscrapers such as New York's Empire State Building and
Chrysler Building.
Although the style took shape in the 1920s, the term Art Deco was not applied to it until 1925,
when it was recognized as a result of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the seminal design exhibition that was held in Paris.
The term Art Deco did not receive
wider usage until it was re-evaluated in
the 1960s. Its practitioners were not working as a
coherent community. It is considered
to be eclectic, being influenced by a variety of sources, to name a few:
- Early work from the Wiener Werkstätte; functional industrial design
- "Primitive" arts of Africa, Egypt, or Aztec Mexico
- Leon Bakst's sets and costumes for
Diaghilev's
Ballets Russes
- Fractionated, crystalline, facetted form of decorative
Cubism and Futurism
- Fauve color palette
- Severe forms of Neoclassicism: Boullée, Schinkel
- Everything associated with Jazz, Jazz Age
or "jazzy"
- Animal motifs and forms; tropical foliage; ziggurats; crystals; stylized fountain motifs
- Lithe athletic "modern" female forms; flappers' bobbed haircuts
- "Machine age" technology such as the radio and skyscraper.
Corresponding to these influences, the Art Deco is characterised by use of materials
such as sharkskin and zebraskin, zigzag
and stepped forms, bold and sweeping curves (unlike the sinuous curves of the
Art
nouveau), chevron patterns, sunburst motif, etc. Some of these motifs were ubiquitous-
for example the sunburst motif was
used in such varied contexts as a lady's shoe, a radiator grille, the spire of the
Chrysler Building. Art Deco was an opulent style and this opulence is
attributed as a reaction to the
forced austerity during the years of World War I. Art Deco was a popular style for interiors of cinema theatres
and ocean liners such as the Ile de France and
Normandie.
As the Deco era approached and as it faded away, we see signs of it mixed in with the era that preceded it and the
era that came about after it was no longer popular. These times are known as transitional times as one era transitions into another.
Some historians see Art Deco as a type of, or early form of,
Modernism
Though Art Deco slowly lost patronage in the West, and was cut short by the austerities of
World War II, in colonial countries such as India,
it became a gateway for Modernism, and continued to be used
well after, even in the nineteen sixties.
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