Art Deco Artists and their history in the art deco period.

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A reference of art deco artists and architectural and decorative-arts designers that typify the art deco style.

After graduating from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Arbus joined his father's Toulouse cabinet making firm, which he later headed. Exhibiting in the Paris Salons from 1926 onwards, he moved to the capital in I930.

Arbus was awarded the Prix Blumenthal in 1935 and exhibited at the great International Exhibitions in Brussels (1935), Paris(1937) and New York (1939).

He ended the firm's production of Furniture in eighteenth century styles, his own designs were very much inspired by the more stylised classicism of the French Empire.

He rejected the rhetoric of the UAM, continuing his workshop system and incorporating luxurious veneers, bleached animal hide vellum and gilt mounts in his furniture.

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Norman Bel Geddes (art deco, designer, 1893-1958)

After studying briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago, Bel Geddes worked in a Chicago advertising agency designing posters for General Motors and Packard.

In 1918 he began a successful career as a stage set designer before turning to industrial design in 1927. Despite commissions for the Toledo Scale Co. (1929), and the Standard Gas Equipment Corp. (1932). it was as polemicist of Modernity that Bel Geddes gained greatest recognition.

His book Horizons (1932) was a manifesto for Modern streamlining which promoted a series of futuristic designs for buildings and transport systems.

Bel Geddes' positivist vision of a streamlined future reached its apogee with his' futurama '' Metropolis of Tomorrow' for the General Motors Highways and Horizons Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

In 1958 Norman Bel Geddes died on 8th of May. In 1960 his autobiography, Miracle in the Evening, was published.

He is the father of actress Barbara Bel Geddes

A.M Cassandre (art deco, designer, 1901-1968)

Born Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, Cassandre studied painting and was a friend of many leading figures in Parisian avant-garde society of the 1920s, including Apollinaire, Fernand Leger and Erik Satie. His posters combined bold images with a stylised simplicity and Modern typefaces.

In 1927 he founded an advertising agency, Alliance Graphique with Charles Loupot and Maurice Moyrand. Cassandre designed three typefaces: Bifur ( 1929), L'Acier ( 1930) and Peignet (1937).

Pierre Chareau (art deco, designer, 1883-1950)

Born in Bordeaux, Chareau first exhibited at the Salon d' Automne in 1914. Trained as an architect, he exhibited in the 1925 Paris Exposition as both an architect and a decorator.

The bold curves and luxurious contrasting of exotic woods in his earlier furniture gave way in the later 1920s to a more functionalist inspired aesthetic.

As a founder member of the UAM, Chareau's belief in the relationship between form and function was reaffirmed, and from 1932 to 1938 he undertook detailed research into the development of mobile room partitions.

Chareau received commissions to design interiors from, among others, Mallet-Stevens, and his most celebrated architectural work was his 1931 collaboration with the Dutch architect Bijvoet on the Mason deVerre, famed for its revolutionary use of glass brick walls and mobile room partitions.

Serge Chermayeff (art deco, designer, 1900-)

Born in the Caucasus, Chermayeff was educated in England. His career from 1924 until his emigration to America in 1939 illustrates the gradual hardening of Modernist attitudes in Britain in the 1930s.

Nevertheless, Chermayeff's work always retained a lyrical quality which set it apart from many of his less inspired contemporaries.

From 1921 to 1927, Chermayeff was chief designer to the London decorating firm F. Williams Ltd before progressing to director of Waring & Gillows's 'Modern Art Studio', for which he designed luxurious modernistic furniture.

He joined the Modernist group MARS in the early 1930s, and worked with the German emigre Erich Mendelsohn, with whom he designed the celebrated De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea, Sussex.

His pioneering designs for the furniture manufacturer PEL introduced the use of tubular steel in Britain. During the same period Chermayeff also designed radio cabinets for Ecko

Clarice Cliff (art deco, designer, 1899-1972)

She began her career as an enameller at the age of thirteen and by 1916 her long standing collaboration with A.J.Wilkinson had begun.

In 1927, after studying at the RCA in London, she returned to Wilkinsons, who introduced her 'Bizzare' wares in 1929.

At first, the Bizzare line simply consisted of her colourful painting on standard forms, but by the early 1930s, new geometric forms were evolved to accommodate her innovative style.

In 1935, she produced a number of other lines for Wilkinsons but after the Bizzare wares were discontinued in 1941 she became more involved in Wilkinsons administration.

• 1899 -- Born on January 20th 1899 in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent.
  
• 1912 -- Started work at the age of 13 in 'The Potteries'.
  
• 1916 -- Moved to the AJ Wilkinson's pottery factory.
  
• 1927 -- Clarice set up her own studio. Bizarre wares launched.
  
• 1940 -- Clarice married her boss, Colley Shorter and moved to Chetwynd House.
  
• 1964 -- The factory stopped producing pottery bearing Clarice's name.
  

Following Colley Shorter's death Clarice sold the factory to Midwinter.

• 1972 -- First Clarice Cliff exhibition takes place at Brighton in 1972.
  
• 1972 -- Clarice Cliff dies suddenly at Chetwynd House on 23rd October 1972.
  

Susie Cooper (art deco, designer, 1902-)

Despite early ambitions to become a fashion designer, Susie Cooper emerged as one of the most important ceramic designers and producers of the century.

Her interest in ceramics was awakened in 1922 and she initially worked with A. E. Gray & Co.

In 1929 she established her own atelier, and her factory produced breakfast sets, tea sets and dinner ware for a largely middle-class market.

Her designs are reported to have caused a sensation at the 1922 British Industries Fair where she sold a clown decorated, triangular lamp base, to a member of the Royal family.

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Michel die Klerk (art deco, designer, 1884-1923)

After collaborating with J.M. van der Mey and Piet Kramer on the Scheepvaarthuis in Amsterdam, de Klerk went on to establish himself as perhaps the most prominent architect of the Amsterdam School.

In his celebrated housing schemes such as Het Scheep in Amsterdam, de KIerk married an adventurous plasticity and strong sense of geometry with an appreciation of traditional Dutch forms and shapes.

Unlike his architecture, de Klerk's furniture was luxurious and expensive, and of 200 pieces made, only about 25 are known to survive.

A suite designed in 1916 was exhibited posthumously at the 1925 Paris Exposition.

De Klerk's importance to contemporary design was reflected in the fact that the Dutch magazine Wendingen devoted six special issues to his work.

Sonia Delaunay (art deco, designer, 1885-1979)

Born in Ukraine, Sonia Delaunay (nee Stern, Terk) trained as a painter before moving to Paris in 1905 and she married the painter Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) in 1910.

As early as 1912 Sonia was designing embroidery and bookbindings alongside her abstract paintings, and after the loss of her private income in 1917 (as a result of the Russian Revolution) she became more preoccupied with her design work.

After spending time in Madrid during the First World War, she opened her Atelier Simultane in Paris, designing fashion, textiles and interiors.

At the 1925 Paris Exposition she ran the Boutique Simultanee where she achieved fame as a designer of modern fashions.

In the 1930's the Delaunays concentrated on public art and advertising, and at the 1937 Paris Exposition they designed a series of large murals

Donald Deskey (art deco, designer, 1894-1989)

Deskey was unusual among the leading proponents of Art Deco design in America in that he was actually born there rather than arriving as an emigre from Europe.

A visit to Paris in 1925 led Deskey to focus on interior and furniture design. His early successes were designs for screens, and in 1927 he entered into partnership with Phillip Vollmer, creating the decorating firm Deskey - Vollmer Inc.

He worked for wealthy private clients in the 1920's but Deskey became more interested in designs suited for mass production in the 1930s.

Archives suggest that some 400 designs for furniture, rugs and textiles by Deskey were put into production.

Djo Bourgeois (art deco, designer, 1898-1937)

Djo Bourgeois was part of the youngest generation of French Art Deco designers who were subsequently attracted to the ethics and aesthetics of Modernism towards the end of the 1920s.

Born in Bezons (Seine et Oise), Djo Bourgeois graduated from the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in 1922.

In 1923 he joined Le Studium Louvre and began exhibiting at the Salon. Le Studium Louvre saw his adventurously Modern designs as providing an opportunity to compete with the work of Charlotte Perriand and Mallet-Stevens.

At first Djo Bourgeois preferred lacquered wood and glass, but soon discovered steel, aluminium and concrete.

He left Le Studium Louvre in 1929. His last exhibit before his death was a dining room with moveable partitions at the 1936 Salon.

Maurice Dufrene (art deco, designer, 1876-1955)

A founder member of the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs, Dufrene with Leon Jallot, was among the group of French designers who became known as the Constructeurs, before the First World War.

Dufrene had worked on Meier-Graefe's 'La Maison Moderne' around 1900 designing in the Art Nouveau style.

By 1910, his work adapted more simplified forms using more substantial materials and construction.

Dufrene's open acceptance of mass production in the 1920s, when he became the artistic director of the studio La Maitrise led to a prolific output.

At the 1925 Paris Exposition, as well as the La Maitrise pavilion, Dufrene designed the 'petit salon' in the 'Ambassade Francaise', a boutique for the furrier Jungman, and the row of shoes on the Pont Alexandre Ill.

Dufrene's stylistic development continued into the 1930s when he experimented with steel and glass.

Jean Dunand (art deco, designer, 1877-1942)

Although he began his career as a sculptor and producer of decorative objects, Dunand became interested in lacquer from 1909 and it is for his lacquered panels, furniture and interiors that he is best remembered.

He exhibited throughout the inter war years, co-designing the smoking room of the Ambassade Francaise at the 1925 Paris Exposition.

By 1921 he was producing and exhibiting large pieces of lacquer furniture, Dunand contributed to the three great French ocean liners of the period, the lle de France ( 1928), the Atlantique (1931) and the Normandie ( 1935).

Paul Follot (art deco, designer, 1877-1941)

Like Dufrene Follot was part of the older generation of Art Deco designers who had developed their style from Art Nouveau.

Follot worked at La Maison Moderne between 1901 and 1903. He became independent in 1904, designing furniture, lighting, carpets, clocks and jewellery.

His style combined simplified traditionally inspired forms with rich decoration, and his work before the First World War represented an exercise in modern decoration which provided a blueprint for much of the more traditional French Art Deco which reached its apex at the 1925 Paris Exposition, to which Follot made a large contribution.

In 1923 Follot became director of design at the Pomone studios of Au Bon Marche before moving to Waring and Gillow's Paris office in 1928 where he worked with Serge Chermayeff.

After 1931 Follot returned to independent practice and in 1935 he received a commission for the ocean liner Normandie as well as exhibiting at the Brussels Exposition.

Paul Theodore Frankl (art deco, designer, 1886-1962)

Born in Prague, Frankl together with his fellow European Joseph Urban, was one of the pioneering Modern designers working in America before 1925, who laid the foundations of the American tradition of modern decoration.

After spending some time in Berlin and Copenhagen, Frankl left for America in 1914 and set up in business in New York. Although at first describing himself as an architect, in 1922 he opened a gallery at 4e, 48th Street which sold a variety of his designs for furniture, as well as modern textiles and wallpapers imported from Europe.

His influence as a designer was compounded by his polemical pro-Modern publications: New Dimensions, Form and Re-Form, Machine Age Leisure, Spaces for Living, and Survey of American Textiles.

In 1926 he introduced his celebrated skyscraper furniture, before turning to metal furnishings in the 1930s.

Gill (art deco, designer, 1882-1940)

Despite a diverse body of work, Gill is best remembered for his sculpture and his typography.

His sans serif typeface, designed in 1928 for the Monotype Corporation, became synonymous with Modern graphic design. Ironically so, as Gill's work and philosophy was based on craft and catholicism.

Gill's stylised sculpture was also chosen to adorn another monument to the modern age, BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London (1929-31).

In 1937 Gill was elected associate of the Royal Academy and awarded honorary apprenticeship of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

Josef Gocar (art deco, designer, 1880-1945)

Gocar was a leading exponent of Czech cubist design in the 1910s, co-founding the Prague Artistic Workshops in 1912.

He had trained at the School of Decorative Arts in Prague between 1906 and 1908 after which he worked for Jan Kotera, 'the founder of modern Czech architecture'.

Between 1922 and 1939, Gocar was Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and in 1925 he was awarded the Grand Prix for the design of the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the Paris Exposition.

Gocar's furniture is among the most exciting and original of the period, with a literal attempt to translate the idea of cubism into three dimensions at its heart.

Eileen Gray (art deco, designer, 1878-1976)

Neglected for most of her career, Eileen Gray is now regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early 20th century and the most influential woman in those fields. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco.

Eileen Gray was to stand alone throughout her career first as a lacquer artist, then a furniture designer and finally as an architect. At a time when other leading designers were almost all male and mostly members of one movement or another she remained independent.

Her design style was as distinctive as her way of working, and Gray developed an opulent, luxuriant take on the geometric forms and industrially produced materials used by the International Style designers, such as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Mies Van Der Rohe, who shared many of her ideals. Her voluptuous leather and tubular steel Bibendum Chair and clinically chic E-1027 glass and tubular steel table are now as familiar as icons of the International Style as Le Corbusier and Perriand’s classic Grand Confort club chairs, yet for most of her career she was relegated to obscurity by the same proud singularity that makes her work so prized today.

From County Wexford, Ireland Eileen Gray was born into an aristocratic family. She entered the Slade School of Art in London in 1898 and moved to Paris in 1902 where she spent the rest of her life, interrupted only by the two world wars.

She was celebrated for her exotic use of lacquer, the technique that she learned from Sougaware, a Japanese master. Gray studied with Sugiwara for four years. Lacquer work was not only painstaking, but perilous. Like many people who come into close contact with it, she contracted a painful lacquer disease on her hands. She slowly refined her technique to create stark forms with simple geometric decorations. This simplicity was, however, as much a product of the complexity of the process as of Gray's aesthetic preferences. It was not until 1913 that she felt confident enough to exhibit her work by showing some decorative panels at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. They attracted the attention of the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre and the couturier Jacques Doucet, who bought one of her panels at the Salon and commissioned other pieces of lacquer work from Eileen for his Paris apartment.

Although Gray did not exhibit consistently at the Salons, she ran her own establishment, the jean Desert Gallery from 1922 until 1930.

Gray's furniture has been characterized as 'luxurious and theatrical' and the gallery never achieved commercial success, although it was supported by sales of her popular carpets..

• 1878 - Born Kathleen Eileen Moray, the youngest of five children, at Brownswood, near Enniscorthy in County Wexford, Ireland. The children are later renamed Gray after their mother’s wealthy, aristocratic family.



• 1900 - Studies at the Slade School of Art in London and visits the International Exposition in Paris with her mother.



• 1902 - Moves to Paris with friends from the Slade to continue her painting studies.



• 1905 - Returns to London to care for her mother during an illness, begins studying lacquer technique at a workshop in Soho.



• 1906 - Back in Paris she studies with the Japanese lacquer craftsman, Seizo Sugawara. The following year she moves into an apartment on rue Bonaparte.



• 1913 - Exhibits lacquer work at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs and is commissioned by her first important client, the couturier Jacques Doucet.



• 1915 - Spends World War I in London with Sugawara working from a studio in Chelsea.



• 1919 - Returning to Paris, Gray creates her first complete interior for an apartment on rue de Lota, which leads to other commissions for lacquerwork and interiors.



• 1922 - Opens Galerie Jean Désert in collaboration with the architecture critic Jean Badovici to sell rugs, furniture and lighting. Introduces tubular steel to her furniture.



• 1923 - Exhibits the Boudoir-bedroom de Monte-Carlo at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. Encouraged by favourable press comment, she begins small-scale architecture studies.



• 1927 - Collaborates with Jean Badovici on the design of E. 1027, a house on the cliffs at Roquebrune near Monaco.



• 1930 - Galerie Jean Désert closes. Eileen and Badovici present plans for the now completed E.1027 at the first Union des Artistes Modernes exhibition.



• 1932 - Begins construction of her second house, Tempe à Pailla.



• 1937 - At Le Corbusier’s invitation, exhibits her plans for a Vacation Centre in his Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux at the Paris Exposition. Gray does not attend the opening and begins a long period of reclusion.



• 1940 - During World War II Tempe à Pailla is looted and the flat in Saint-Tropez where Gray stored many of her posessions is bombed. Isolated in Provence, Gray’s wartime work is limited to gouaches, unrealised architectural schemes and revisions of her furniture.



• 1954 - Begins construction of her third house, Lou Pérou, near Saint-Tropez.



• 1968 - After years of neglect, Gray’s work is the subject of an article by Joseph Rykwert in Domus magazine.



• 1970 - Exhibitions of Gray’s architecture are organised in Graz and Vienna.



• 1972 - The revival of interest in Gray is enhanced by an auction in Paris of the contents of Jacques Doucet’s apartment and an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. Zeev Aram, a London furniture maker, reproduces three pieces of her furniture.



• 1976 - Eileen Gray dies in her apartment on rue Bonaparte in Paris

Oliver Hill (art deco, designer, 1887-1968)

Hill attended evening classes at the Architectural Association, London. After the First World War he returned to practice becoming a fashionable society architect working predominantly in the neo-georgian and neo-vernacular styles.

After 1930 Hill designed a number of buildings in the modern style, although his ambiguous relationship with the more doctrinaire elements in the Modern Movement is embodied in his use of decoration.

While Joldwynds (1933) and his scheme for Frinton (1933) appear to belong firmly to the Modern Movement, at the Midland Hotel, Morecambe (1934), he used Erie Gill and Erie Ravilious for decorative assistance.

Hill also designed the British Pavilion for the Exposition Internationale in Paris, 1937.

Josef Hoffman (art deco, designer, 1870-1956)

Josef Hoffmann studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, under Art Nouveau architect Otto Wagner, whose theories of functional, modern architecture profoundly influenced his works.

In 1903 Hoffmann co-founded the Wiener Werkstatte, and his stewardship of the workshop lasted until 1931.

Hoffmann studied under Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and had also been a founding member of the Vienna Secession in 1897.

His influence on the Wiener Werkstatte was all pervasive. He designed its most celebrated architectural achievements, the Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1902-3) and the Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1909-1911), as well as designing for all branches of decorative arts.

The strict grid pattern which formed the basis to many of his designs, as well as being a favoured decorative motif, earned him the nickname 'Quadrutl H Hoffmann’ (Little Square Hoffmann).

His work for the Wiener Werkstatte was a pivotal element in the development of a European tradition of decorative modern design, to which the Parisian Art Deco of the 1920s provided a continuation.

In 1896, he joined Otto Wagners office.

In 1898, he established his own practice in Vienna.

In 1897, inspired by charles rennie mackintosh and the Glasgow School, he was one of the founding members, together with Gustav Klimt, of an association of revolutionary artists and architects called the Vienna Secession.

In 1903, he founded with architects Koloman Moser and Joseph Maria Olbrich, the Wiener Werkstätte for decorative arts. He is an important precursor of the Modern Movement and the Art Deco style.

In 1905, Hoffmann, Klimt and the Wiener Werkstätte artists, designed the Palais Stoclet, in Brussels, the Capital of Art Nouveau and city of Victor Horta.

Charles Hoiden (art deco, designer, 1875-1960)

The architecture of Charles Hoiden exemplifies the pragmatic compromise that was British Art Deco.

Included in Hoiden's early career was as an assistant to Charles Robert Ashbee.

After the First World War he became a member of the Design in Industries Association, through which he met Frank Pick who commissioned him to build new facades for existing London Underground stations and for new stations on the extended Northern Line.

He traveled with Pick throughout Northern Europe and his work on the new stations on the Piccadilly Line established a brick-built, modern house style for the Underground which echoed the work of architects in Holland such as Dudok.

From 1931, Holden was involved in the scheme to centralise the London University, the most prominent monument of which is the University's Senate House in Bloomsbury.

Raymond Hood (art deco, designer, 1881-1934)

Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, the early years of Hood's architectural career were spent in obscurity.

He was catapulted to fame in 1922 when, together with John Mead Howells, he won the competition to design the Chicago Tribune Tower.

Despite the fact that the building was neo-Gothic rather than Art Deco, his remaining twelve years of practice included work on some of the most significant American buildings of the age: the American Radiator Building in New York (1925), which combined a more subdued Gothic with a more confident modernity; the Rockefeller building (1931), which he co-designed and remains an icon of Art Deco, and the McGraw Hill Building with its terracotta exterior.

His last commission was to design the Electricity Building at the 1933 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago.

Pavel Janak (art deco, designer, 1882-1956)

After studying under Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1906-8), Janak returned to his native Prague, where he was to design some of the most remarkable furniture and ceramics of the Czech cubist movement.

In 1908, he co-founded the Artel Cooperative, which proved so crucial to the realisation of many of the cubists' designs.

Janak joined the Group of Plastic Artists in 1911 and was one of the editors of Umelecky Mesicnik as well as being a founder member of the Prague Artistic Workshops in 1912.

Betty Joel (art deco, designer, 1894-1985)

Born Mary Steward Lockhart in Hong Kong, Betty ]Joel was educated in England and met David Joel while he was in the navy serving in the Far East.

In 1918, they married and, although neither had any formal design training, they began manufacturing furniture under the name Betty Joel Ltd.

Early work was in a modernized Arts and Crafts idiom, however, by the late 1920's and early 1930’s French Art Deco influences were clear.

Betty Joels London showroom was at 177 Sloane Street and then 25 Knightsbridge.

The firm's clients were wide ranging, both corporate and private. Furniture was manufactured for the Savoy and St Jame's Palace hotels and for many of H.S. Goodhart Rendel's projects, including Hays Wharf.

Her more celebrated private clients included Lord Louis Mountbatten and the then Duchess of York.

Francis Jourdain (art deco, designer, 1876-1958)

One of the founders of the UAM, Jourdain had always held an ambivalent attitude towards decoration. His relatively austere, angular work exhibited at the Salon d' Automne in 1902 had effectively renounced the Art Nouveau style of his contemporaries.

For clients demanding luxury, his concession might be the use of a rich veneer. As a result of his sparse style, many of his early commissions were for public spaces rather than private interiors.

Jourdain exhibited at the 1925 Paris Exposition and from then onwards he began to use steel, aluminium and lacquer.

Jourdain retired in 1939 to spend more time writing.

Ely Jacques Kahn (art deco, designer, 1884-1972)

After graduating from the Architecture School of Columbia University in 1907, Kahn spent four years in Paris studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

He became a partner in the firm Buchman & Fox, which he eventually dominated, and was well placed to play an influential role on the New York architectural scene between 1925 and 1930.

As well as exhibiting in The Architect and the Industrial Arts at the Metropolitan Museum in 1929, Kahn was responsible for some of the great decorative buildings of the 1920s, such as 261 Fifth Avenue and 2 Park Avenue with its brightly coloured terracotta exterior by L.V. Solovon.

Piet Kramer (art deco, designer, 1881-1961)

Kramer met Michel de Klerk while working in the office of the Amsterdam architect Eduard Cuypers and he collaborated with J.M van der Mey, another leading figure of the Amsterdam School, on the Scheepvaarthuis in Amsterdam.

Kramer took part in five of the Amsterdam social housing projects which characterized the work of the school in the years 1915-1925.

The use of brickwork to carry the abstract geometric decoration on the facades of his buildings proved an antecedent to some of the more flamboyant decorative exercises in Art Deco architecture, while his use of brick also provided inspiration for the more pragmatic approach of the suburban Art Deco of Britain.

Kramer was also a notable furniture designer.

Rene Jules Lalique (art deco, designer, 1860-1945)

Lalique's professional career, first as a goldsmith and then, more famously, as a glass maker, spanned both the Art Nouveau and the Art Deco eras.

Lalique rented his first glassworks in 1909, at Combs-la-vile near Fontainebleau. Initially the factory produced only perfume bottles, but by the 1920s Lalique began to manufacture other works in glass such as jewellery, mirrors, lamps, chandeliers and tableware.

He exhibited at Paris in 1925, his celebrated glass fountain provided both a centrepiece for the Perfume Pavilion as well as a defining symbol of French Art Deco of the 1920s.

By the 1930s, Lalique's innovation was challenged by other makers such as Sabino, and even though he was in his seventies, Lalique continued his stewardship of the firm which had grown to employ over 600 people.

 

Le Corbusier - Charles-Eduard Jeanneret (art deco, designer, 1887-1965)

Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Le Corbusier worked under his real name, Charles-Eduard Jeanneret until the early 1920s.

In 1907 he travelled in Europe, meeting Josef Hoffmann in Vienna.

From 1908 until 1909 he worked for the Paris architect Auguste Perret, and in 1910 and 1911 in the Berlin office of Peter Behrens.

In 1911, the publication in France of his Etude sur le Mouvement d'art decoratif en Allemagne, associated Jeanneret's name with the debate on the role of national identity and decorative arts in France.

Indeed it was as a decorator that Jeanneret became known in the Parisian art world, working with such designers as Andre Groult and Paul Poiret.

However, through his involvement with the Purist painter Amedee Ozenfant, Jeanneret by now known as Le Corbusier, developed the anti-decorative theory for which he became famous.

In 1925, his Pavilion de L'Espirit Nouveau at the Paris Exposition became an icon of the burgeoning modernist movement, and his books The Decorative Art of Today and Towards A New Architecture, showed that his ability as a polemicist matched his skill as a designer.

A founder member of the UAM, Le Corbusier is often portrayed as representing the antithesis of Art Deco (his pavilion was marginalised at the 1925 exhibition).

But his work before 1920 and the influence of the modernist aesthetic on the development of Art Deco in Europe and America from the late 1920s, make him an important figure in the history of the art deco style.

Raymond Loewy (art deco, designer, 1893-1986)

Loewy studied electrical engineering in his native France before emigrating to America after serving in the First World War.

Following a brief spell as window dresser at Macy's, he worked as a fashion illustrator on Harpers Bazaar.

He recognised the potential of applying the principles of commercial art to the actual products of industry and in 1929 was commissioned to modernize the Gestetner mimeograph machine.

In 1930 he set up his own design consultancy and in 1935 he revamped the Sears Roebuck refrigerator, signing the 'Coldspot', and in doing so brought the streamlined, white curves of the moderne style into kitchens across America.

He published influential futuristic designs for taxis, cars and trains as well as designing locomotives for the Pennsylvanian Railroad and the distinctive Greyhound Coach (1940).

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (art deco, designer, 1868-1928)

Apprenticed in his native Glasgow to the architect John Hutchinson between 1884 and 1889, Mackintosh traveled widely in Europe in the 1890s.

He designed posters from the mid 1890s, and also exhibited at the 1896 Arts and Crafts exhibition.

In 1897 Mackintosh began the first phase of his work on the Glasgow School of Art, which he also extended in 1907.

Other work in Scotland included the Willow Tea Rooms (1903) and Hill House (1904).

Despite international acclaim, Mackintosh never achieved commercial success. He left Glasgow in 1914, and between 1915 and 1920 he carried out work for the industrialist W.J. Bassett-Lowke, most notably at 78 Derngate, Northampton.

After traveling through France in the mid 1920s, Mackintosh died of cancer in London in 1928.

Robert Mallet-Stevens (art deco, designer, 1886-1945)

Trained at the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture (1905-10), Mallet-Stevens built little until after the First World War.

His work at the 1925 Paris Exposition included the cubist concrete trees by the Martel Brothers in his Winter Garden and the distinctive tower for his 'Pavillon du Tourism', both of which established him as the archetypal maverick Modernist, setting an international mould for Art Deco architects of the 1920s and 1930s.

His most celebrated commissions were the Villa for the Viscount de Noailles in Hyeres (1923-5), the Rue Mallet-Stevens in Auteuil (1926-7) and the Casino at Saint Jean-de-luz (1928),

His disregard for the social dimension of Modernism did not prevent him assuming the presidency of the UAM in 1930, and although he undertook commissions at the 1935 Brussels exhibition and the 1937 Paris Exposition Universalles, his work never eclipsed his triumphs in the 1920s.

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Andre Mare (art deco, designer, 1887-1932)

Andre Mare was an artist, and studied at the Academie Julian Louis Sue also trained as a painter, but turned to interior design as early as 1905.

The lack of design or craft training led both Sue and Mare to be grouped with the Coloristes in Paris before the First World War.

Mare was involved with Duchamp Villon's Maison Cubiste in 1912, while Sue worked with Poiret until the founding of La Maison Martine in 1912. In the same year, Sue set up his own decorating firm, L' atelier Francais, and began his association with Mare in 1914.

This association became a partnership in 1919 with the foundation of La Compagnie des Arts Francaise which lasted until 1928.

Sue et Mare worked across the spectrum of the decorative arts from wallpapers to furniture. Their furniture used exotic woods and was clearly inspired by traditional French styles.

At the 1925 Paris Exposition their pavilion, Un Musee d'Art Contemporian, rivalled Ruhlmann's and the firm also exhibited furniture in the Ambassade Francaise and the Perfums d'Orsay boutique among other pavilions.

The partnership ended in 1928 and Sue continued to work in France throughout the 1930s.

Edward McKnight Kauffer (art deco, illustrator, 1890-1954)

A poster designer and illustrator, Kauffer was an American who settled in England. His first commission to design a poster for the Underground Railway Co. came in 1915.

In 1921 he gave up painting and became devoted to commercial art. His commissions reveal a portfolio of celebrated modern commercial graphic design, his clients including: the London Transport Board, Shell, BP, the Great Western Railway, the General Post Office, and the Gas, Light & Coal Co.

A fellow of the British Institute of Industrial Art and member of the Council for Art and Industry, Kauffer was married to the celebrated textile and carpet designer Marion Doran, another American who came to England in the early 1920s.

The two exhibited together in 1929.

Koloman Moser (art deco, designer, 1868-1918)

Studying under Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Moser, together with Hoffmann was a founder of both the Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte.

Although he trained as a painter, by the late 1890s, Moser was active in the decorative arts winning a prize at the Paris Exposition Universalle in 1900.

His major contribution to the Werkstatte came in his design of the interiors of Hoffmann's Purkersdorf Sanatorium in 1905.

It was Moser's departure in 1908 that heralded a move away from the strict geometry of the Werkstatte's early and most influential work.

Dagobert Peche (art deco, designer, 1887-1923)

Berta Zuckerkandl described Peche as, 'the greatest genius of ornament that Austria has possessed since the Baroque'.

Peche trained at the technical college in Vienna and at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1908 to 1911.

He joined the Werkstatte in 1915, and his work characterized, and indeed influenced the shift towards a more whimsical, folk inspired aesthetic in the workshop.

Peche designed the Wiener Werkstatte's Zurich branch, where he was based from 1917 to 1918.

Although Peche's work was not confined to any one branch of the applied arts, it is for his delightfully ornamented small objects that he is best remembered. His ornamental objects in chased silver from the earlier 1920s illustrate how far the Werkstatte had moved from Moser's geometry in the years since his departure.

Paul Poiret (art deco, designer, 1879-1944)

The son of a Parisian shopkeeper, Poiret became a dress designer in 1896 after meeting Jacques Doucet.

In 1910 he visited Vienna, met Josef Hoffmann and took inspiration from the textile and fashion designs of the Wiener Werkstatte.

He founded his Atelier Martine in 1911 and his Maison Martine on Fauborg Saint-Honore sold rugs, carpets and wallpapers.

Together with his long-term collaborator, the painter Raoul Duty, Poiret began a studio for printing textiles, La Petite Usine.

In 1908 and 1911 Poiret published volumes of his designs, which was in itself an innovative step, and as a result he was received warmly when he visited America in 1913.

He continued to work in the 1920s and 1930s, but his contribution to the 1925 Paris Exposition, three decorated barges, brought Poiret to the edge of financial ruin.

Gio Ponti (art deco, designer, 1891-1979)

After studying architecture at the Polytechnic in Milan (1918 - 21), Ponti became a designer for Richard Ginori the Doccia ceramics firm.

His work, often in a stylised and humorous classical idiom, gained him the Grand Prix at the 1925 Paris Exposition.

As a result of the exposure he received at Paris, he was asked to design a range of cutlery for Christofle and a villa for the firm's chairman.

In 1927 he left Ginori to set up an architectural practice with Emilio Lancia, and a year later he became the founder editor of Domus a journal which promoted the work and ideas of the Novecento movemert,

The Novecento, which Ponti founded together with other architects such as Giovanni Muzio, combined tradition, decoration and a striking modernity providing a starting point for Italian designers who, keen to absorb what they had seen in Paris, were inspired to produce decorative and modern pieces.

Jean Puiforcat (art deco, designer, 1897-1945)

Puiforcat joined the family firm of silversmiths while he was studying sculpture with Louis-Aime Lejeure.

After setting up his own workshop in 1922, Puiforcat's work came to embody the simple geometric wing of the Art Deco idiom. Puiforcat's objects relied on a purity of line and mathematical proportions as opposed to applied decoration.

In 1929 he was a founding member of the UAM; however, despite his aesthetic similarities with the Modern Movement, his refusal to compromise in his use of silver ensured Puiforcat maintained his status as a designer of luxury items.

In 1934 his work took a new direction when he began to produce liturgical