Roaring Twenties

The History of Art Deco: From Paris to the World

The 1920s visual style now called Art Deco was not named by its practitioners and was not, in any meaningful sense, a deliberate movement. It was the cumulative result of three converging currents: the high-craft decorative revival of pre-war Paris, the new vocabulary of the European avant-garde (Cubism, Fauvism, the Ballets Russes, the African and Oceanic sources), and the machine aesthetic of the Bauhaus and the Wiener Werkstätte. The name Art Deco was not in use until the British historian Bevis Hillier published Art Deco of the 20s and 30s in 1968.

For the wider Art Deco context, see the parent Art Deco Design cluster page and the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For the architecture it produced, For the fashion and jewelry,

The 1925 Exposition

The founding event of Art Deco was the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. The exposition ran from April to October 1925, occupied the Esplanade des Invalides and the quays of the Seine, and gathered approximately 15,000 exhibitors from twenty countries. The pavilions themselves were the principal 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, 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 most consequential American non-event of the exposition was the absence of a United States Pavilion. American commercial participation in the fair was substantial, but the official federal participation was blocked by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who regarded European modern design as insufficiently rooted in craft and as “un-American.” The result was that the American stylistic response to Art Deco was delayed by a few years, but the influence of the style on American designers, who had attended the fair privately, was immediate.

The French term used at the exposition itself was simply les arts décoratifs (the decorative arts) or le style moderne; the connection between the fair and the eventual name Art Deco was made only by Hillier in 1968.

The Precursor Movements

Art Deco was the heir of several earlier decorative-arts movements that had taken shape in Europe between 1890 and 1914.

The Arts and Crafts movement, founded in Britain in the 1880s by William Morris and his associates, had argued for the dignity of handcraft and the integration of design and production. The Vienna Secession (founded 1897) and the Wiener Werkstätte (founded 1903 by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser) were the Austrian response: a sober, geometric, almost industrial visual idiom that was a direct ancestor of Art Deco.

The Deutscher Werkbund, founded in Munich in 1907, was the German parallel. Peter Behrens, who served as artistic advisor to AEG from 1907, was the founding figure, and his three pupils, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius (the last of whom founded the Bauhaus in 1919), were the three principal figures of the 20th-century International Style.

The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919, was the most influential design school of the 20th century. Under Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus trained a generation of designers in the doctrines of the geometric form, the unornamented surface, and the design of objects for mass production. The Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, and many of its leading figures emigrated to the United States, where they taught at Black Mountain College, the Illinois Institute of Technology (Mies, from 1938), the Institute of Design in Chicago (László Moholy-Nagy), and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (Gropius, from 1937).

The French Art Deco Masters

The first generation of Art Deco designers in Paris was a generation of craftsmen working in luxury materials for a small, wealthy clientele. Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933) was the most famous furniture designer of the period, a perfectionist whose work was almost all one-of-a-kind, and whose rare veneers, ivory inlays, and shagreen-covered surfaces defined the high Art Deco interior. René Lalique (1860-1945) was the master of Art Deco glass. Jean Dunand (1877-1942) was the Swiss-born master of lacquer. Erté (Romain de Tirtoff, 1892-1990) was the Russian-born illustrator and designer who fixed the Art Deco image in the popular mind; Erté’s covers of Harper’s Bazaar from 1925 to 1938 defined the Jazz Age look in graphics. Edgar Brandt (1880-1960) was the master of wrought iron. Jules Leleu (1883-1961) was a French furniture designer known for the more functional wing of the Art Deco interior. Paul Poiret (1879-1944) was the fashion designer who, before Coco Chanel, had done the most to free women from the corset.

The Ballets Russes and the Tutankhamun Discovery

Two external events shaped the visual vocabulary of Art Deco more than any others. The Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev, in residence in Paris from 1909 until Diaghilev’s death in 1929, was the single most important decorative-arts influence of the early 20th century. The set and costume designers who worked for the company, including Léon Bakst (Scheherazade, 1910; L’après-midi d’un faune, 1912), Alexandre Benois (Petrushka, 1911), and Natalia Goncharova (The Golden Cockerel, 1914), produced visual schemes of a high color, an exoticized geometry, and an orientalizing luxury that the rest of the decorative-arts world imitated for the next twenty years. Poiret’s fashions of 1911-13 were essentially Ballets Russes costumes for the street.

The 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon was the single most influential art-historical event of the 1920s. The golden death mask, the lotus-and-papyrus motifs, the geometric repetition of hieroglyphic ornament, the color of the inlaid lapis lazuli and carnelian, and the angular profile of the figures all entered the Western decorative vocabulary at once. Cartier in particular was a quick and direct borrower; the firm’s “Tutti Frutti” bracelets of 1924-26 were the most direct jeweler’s response. The wider Art Deco taste for bright color, angular geometry, and exotic repetition was Egyptian-influenced throughout the late 1920s.

The American Adoption and the Modern Revival

The American adoption of Art Deco was, as noted, delayed by Hoover’s refusal to participate officially in the 1925 exposition, but the style arrived anyway. The first major American Art Deco skyscraper, the American Radiator Building in New York, was built in 1924; the Paramount Building followed in 1926. The American skyscraper of 1928-32, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building above all, fixed the Art Deco image in the American mind.

The Art Deco Society of New York, founded in 1980, and the parallel societies in Miami Beach, Los Angeles, London, and elsewhere, marked the academic revival of the style. The Miami Beach Architectural District (the South Beach Art Deco district), with 960 or more contributing buildings, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, one of the largest historic-designation projects in the United States. The 21st-century revival of the style, in the form of preserved movie palaces, preserved skyscrapers, and the Wolfsonian-FIU museum in Miami Beach, is, in effect, a recognition of the historical importance of the style.

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