Art Deco

Art Deco, an innovative design style popular in the 1920s and 1930s. It was used primarily in furniture, jewellery, textiles, ceramics, and interior design. Its sleek, streamlined forms conveyed elegance and sophistication. 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.

Art Deco developed both as a reaction against the elaborate and sinuous turn-of-the-centruy Art Nouveau style and as a new aesthetic that celebrated the machine age, which was gathering momentum. Its central characteristics are clean lines and sharp edges, stylishness and symmetry. Bright primary colours, the use of chrome, enamel, and highly polished stone, and references to ancient Egyptian and Greek design are also associated with the style. The finest Art Deco designs were not generally mass-produced; however, its inherent simplicity made it adaptable to the mass production of less refined objects such as cheap jewellery, tableware, and household items.

Two of Art Deco's earliest exponents were the couturier Paul Poiret and the jeweller and glassmaker René Lalique; their designs featured delicate, unconstricted, flowing lines. Further important influences were Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, established in 1909, with its Oriental stage décor and exotic colours; King Tutankhamen's tomb (opened in 1922), which created a vogue for Egyptian motifs; and Cubism, with its elegantly geometric aesthetic. Leading designers of the 1920s and 1930s were Jacques Émile Ruhlmann in furniture, Jean Dunand in lacquerwork, Jean Puiforcat in silver, and Lalique in jewellery.

Art Deco became more geometric and linear as objects were increasingly mass produced and as the United States supplanted France as the spiritual centre of the movement. In America, the style found expression in objects as diverse as locomotives, skyscrapers, roadside diners, radio cabinets, jukeboxes, and advertising displays. In France notable examples of Art Deco in architecture were Ruhlmann's Paris exhibition rooms, Le Pavillon d'un Collectioneur at the exhibition of 1925, and the grand salon (c. 1930) of the French liner Normandie, with lighting and décor by Lalique. In Britain, a well known example of Art Deco architecture and design is the Hoover factory in Perivale, West London, designed by Wallis Gilbert and Partners in 1932. Primary in the United States are the interior of Radio City Music Hall (1931) in New York, designed by Donald Deskey; and William van Alen's Chrysler Building (1930, New York), with its sleek aluminium-banded façades and arched and pointed spire.

Art Deco declined after 1935 but enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and 1970s. See also Glass.