The International Art Design Movement Called Art Deco
Art Deco is an architectural and decorative-arts style, popular from 1910 to 1940, that is characterized by highly stylized natural and geometric forms and ornaments, usually strongly symmetrical. Outstanding American examples of Art Deco are the Chrysler Building and Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Some of the century’s most significant artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Sonia Delaunay, and Wassily Kandinsky, produced work in the style, as did designers of furnishings, textiles, jewelry, and advertising.
Art Deco themes were often classical motifs reduced to basic geometric stylizations. Edgar Brandt decorated wrought-iron screens with symmetrical fountains; Emil Ruhlman inlaid ebony cabinets with ivory to depict floral arrangements of geometrical precision; Rene Lalique etched scenes, such as a gracefully striding female with a wolfhound or a gazelle, into crystal or frosted glass; and Jean Puiforcat and Daum depicted abstract geometric forms.
The term Art Deco, coined in the 1960s when interest in the style revived, was derived from L’Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. This Paris exhibition of 1925 came midway in Art Deco’s development and was a definitive display of the style. At this time Art Deco was also known as “Art Moderne” or “Modernistic”; later it was called “Jazz Pattern,” or “Skyscraper Modern.”
The International Style in architecture developed at the same time, and after 1925 it considerably influenced the final phase of Art Deco. Along with Cubist painting and the German Bauhaus school, the work of Le Corbusier and other International Style architects effected a change from the earlier, more decorative phase of Art Deco toward a simpler, bolder approach typical of the 1930s.
Art Deco emerged as a reaction to Art Nouveau. Its two forerunners were Charles Rennie Mackintosh of Scotland and Josef Hoffmann of Vienna. These men were reformers of the excesses of the Art Nouveau style, and their works in 1900 were an indication of what was to appear in the next decades.
Hoffman’s austere Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905-11), with its mosaic murals by Gustave Klimt, was surprisingly advanced for its time, and it marked the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco. In 1903 Hoffman founded the Wiener Werkstatte, a workshop that produced some of the earliest Art Deco designs. These concepts were introduced in Paris in 1910 with an exhibition of decorative arts from Munich and Vienna at the Louvre.
On display was a new style based on a simplification of the early 19th-century neoclassical Biedermeier style and of peasant art, or Folk Art, quite the antithesis of Art Nouveau. Another significant event in Paris in 1910 was the presentation by the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev of Scheherazade. Leon Bakst had concocted oriental sets and costumes in dazzling, barbaric colors; this brought a demand in the fashion world for exoticism, soon answered by the couturier Paul Poiret. In 1912, Poiret created his own design school, the Atelier Martine, to further his Art Deco ideas.
