Roaring Twenties

Art Deco Design: The Style of the Jazz Age

The single visual style most associated with the 1920s is Art Deco, the geometric, machine-age, sunburst-and-zigzag aesthetic that turned the Chrysler Building’s crown into the silhouette of a generation. Art Deco was not invented as a theory. It was named retroactively, after the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, and it did not become a label for a recognized style until the British historian Bevis Hillier used it in his 1968 book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. The style itself, however, had been the dominant visual idiom of the Jazz Age for almost a decade before anyone called it by the name we use today.

For a comprehensive look at the cultural context, return to the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For a deep dive into how the style came to be named and exported, For the buildings it produced, For the jewelry and textiles,

The 1925 Exposition and the Birth of a Style

The 1925 Paris Exposition was the founding event of the style. Organized under the title Arts Décoratifs (decorative arts) and held from April to October 1925, the exposition gathered roughly 15,000 exhibitors from twenty countries along the Esplanade des Invalides and the surrounding quays of the Seine. The pavilions themselves were the exhibits: the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret was a small white box that argued, against the prevailing decorative temper of the exposition, for the unornamented machine aesthetic; the Soviet Pavilion by Konstantin Melnikov was a stacked, saw-tooth wooden construction that became one of the iconic images of the fair; the Polish Pavilion won a Grand Prize. The official United States pavilion, organized at the last minute by the museum director and silk merchant Eliel Saarinen, was the country’s first major statement on the international design stage.

The American response to the 1925 exposition was famously delayed. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover had resisted the official U.S. entry on the grounds that European modern design was un-American; American private exhibitors were permitted to send wares, but no official pavilion was built. The American merchants and department stores that did attend came back converted, and within three years New York’s Fifth Avenue had absorbed the style. The term Art Deco was not actually used at the exposition itself; the French called the style simply le style moderne or les arts décoratifs, and the connection between the fair and the eventual name was made only by Hillier in 1968.

Sources of the Style

Art Deco was a hybrid of several earlier movements, and the rich stew of its sources is what made it so absorptive. The most important were:

The French Masters

The leading French designers of the early Art Deco period were almost all craftsmen, not industrial designers. The first generation of the new style worked in luxury materials for a small, rich clientele, and the style only later became the visual signature of the popular culture.

The American Skyscraper

The buildings that most fully defined the Art Deco style in the public mind were the setback skyscrapers of New York, Detroit, and Chicago. The first major American Art Deco skyscraper was the American Radiator Building of 1924, designed by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, a black-brick shaft with gold terra cotta ornament that looked, in 1920s photographs, like a slab of polished anthracite. (For the full list of canonical Art Deco buildings,

The Chrysler Building of 1930, designed by William Van Alen, was the iconic Art Deco tower: the seven-story crown of overlapping arches in Nirosta stainless steel, the triangular windows, the eagle gargoyles modeled on Chrysler hood ornaments, and the secret observation deck hidden in the spire, which was assembled inside the building and raised through the roof in a single 90-minute operation on October 23, 1929, in the famous “Race to the Top” with the 40 Wall Street (Bank of Manhattan Trust Building) of H. Craig Severance, the former Van Alen partner with whom he had quarreled. The Empire State Building of 1931, designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, was the more sober, more austere version of the Art Deco skyscraper, and at 1,250 feet it remained the tallest building in the world for nearly four decades.

Other notable American Art Deco towers of the 1920s and very early 1930s include the Fisher Building in Detroit (1928, Albert Kahn), the Chanin Building in New York (1929, Sloan and Robertson), the Paramount Building (1926, C. W. Rapp and George L. Rapp), the General Electric Building (1929, John W. Cross), and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (1931, Schultze and Weaver). The McGraw-Hill Building of 1931, also by Raymond Hood, was the most radical: a setback tower faced in blue-green terracotta, with horizontal bands of windows that looked forward to the International Style of the next decade.

Graphic Design and the Visual Image

The Art Deco style quickly became the visual language of the 1920s press, particularly the poster and the magazine cover. The leading French poster artist of the period was A.M. Cassandre (Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, 1901-1968), whose posters for the Chemin de Fer du Nord (1925), the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (1927), and the Dubonnet aperitif (1932) defined the modern travel and consumer poster. The typography of the period was the geometric sans-serif, particularly the work of the French foundry Deberny et Peignot and the Dutch designer Paul Schuitema.

The illustrators of the period, working in the slick-paper magazines of the late 1920s, included Georges Lepape, Erté (already mentioned above), the American Coles Phillips (whose “fade-away girls” of the late 1910s and 1920s dissolved the figure into the background), and the British Austin Cooper, whose jazz and theatre posters of the 1920s set the visual standard for the British commercial poster for two decades.

The Cloche and the Beaded Dress: Fashion

Art Deco’s effect on fashion was immediate and lasting. The dominant 1920s silhouette in women’s fashion was a long, slim, dropped-waist, ankle-length dress that ended the corseted, pigeon-breast, hemmed-at-the-calf look of the Edwardian era. The hat that matched the new silhouette was the cloche, a close-fitting, bell-shaped, deep-pulled-down hat that forced the hair to be cut short, the bob, and turned the face into a vertical oval. (For the wider social history of the look, and 1920s Fashion and Clothing.)

Evening wear of the period was beaded, embroidered, and ornamented in the Art Deco vocabulary: the long strands of pearls (real or costume) worn in multiples, the geometric beadwork in black on black, the long tasseled fringes, the opera-length gloves, the long cigarette holder. Coco Chanel, who had opened her first shop in 1910 and her famous Paris establishment in 1918, was the most influential single figure in the popularization of the look. Her use of costume jewelry (the fakes, the long chains of glass pearls, the Art Deco paste brooches) was a deliberate democratization, a refusal of the late-Victorian idea that only the rich should wear real jewels.

Tamara de Lempicka: The Iconic Painter

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) was, for a brief period in the mid- and late 1920s, the most recognizable painter of the Art Deco style. Born in Warsaw, raised in St. Petersburg, exiled by the Russian Revolution, and trained in Paris under André Lhote (whose own synthesizing style of “synthetic cubism” bridged the cubist avant-garde and the decorative), Lempicka produced between 1925 and 1933 a series of portraits of aristocrats, socialites, and self-portraits that combined the geometric faceting of late Cubism with the polished surfaces of Ingres and the chic, elongated, machine-age glamour of the period. Autoportrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) of 1929, commissioned for the cover of the German magazine Die Dame as a portrait of the modern woman driver, is the iconic image of the style in painting. Lempicka lived in the United States from 1939.

The Global Spread

Art Deco was the first truly global decorative-arts style. By the early 1930s, examples could be found on every continent. The Marine Building in Vancouver (1930) was a tall, narrow, terracotta-clad Art Deco tower that became the city’s signature. The Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California (1931, Timothy Pflueger), and the Fisher Building in Detroit (1928) were among the most lavishly ornamented American movie palaces in the style. The Palmolive Building in Chicago (1929) was a North Michigan Avenue Art Deco tower with a clock and the famous Lindbergh beacon. The National Tobacco Company Building in Durham, North Carolina, and the Greenville City Hall in South Carolina were among the southern landmarks.

Abroad, the style appeared in the Strand Arcade in Sydney (1921-32, although the original building is 1891-93; the 1921 rebuilding and redecoration of the interior is the Art Deco layer). The Eros Theatre in Mumbai (1938) and the Regal Cinema in Mumbai (1933) brought Art Deco to the Art Deco precincts of Bombay. The Skyline Drive-In Theater in Commerce Township, Michigan (1924) and the various Miami Beach hotels that became the Miami Beach Architectural District (the district would be listed on the National Register in 1979, with over 960 contributing buildings, the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture in the world) brought the style to the entertainment and the resort.

The Decline of the Style

Art Deco did not decline in a single moment. By the mid-1930s, however, the style was being displaced by the International Style, the unornamented, glass-and-steel, prismatic-tower aesthetic associated with Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and their American followers. The Great Depression had dried up the private commissions that had supported the high Art Deco craftsmen. The 1933 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago was the last great World’s Fair at which Art Deco was the dominant idiom; by the time of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the International Style had taken the public stage. In the 21st century, Art Deco has been continuously revived, from the 1980s Art Deco Society of New York (founded 1980) to the 21st-century preservation districts of Miami Beach, Napier (New Zealand), and Mumbai. The style remains the most visible, most photographed, most reproduced aesthetic of the 20th century, and the 1920s remains its iconic decade.

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