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 art deco style, as did
many designers of furnishings, textiles, jewellery, and advertising.
In Balboa Park, the Ford Building (now the Aerospace Museum) exemplifies
industrial design. The tall circular tower is clad in blue fins
separating giant gear teeth. An allusion to a cogwheel and a reference
to the advancement of humankind through mechanization. 
Architect Walter Teague designed
the building as an “Expo Plant” for the 1935 California
Pacific International Exposition.
Art Deco themes were often classical motifs reduced to geometric stylisations.
Edgar Brandt decorated wrought-iron screens with symmetrical fountains;
Emil Ruhlman inlaid ebony cabinets with ivory to depict floral arrangements
of geometrical precision; René
Lalique etched scenes, such as a graceful striding female with
a wolfhound or gazelle, into crystal or frosted glass; and Jean
Puiforcat and Daum depicted abstract geometric forms.
The term art deco, was coined
in the 1960s when interest in the style revived, and was derived
from L'Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels
Modernes. This Paris exhibition of 1925 came midway in Art Deco's
development and was a definitive display of the style. At that 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.
The two forerunners of the art deco style were Charles
Rennie Mackintosh of Scotland and Josef
Hoffmann of Vienna. Both men were reformers of the excesses
of the art nouveau style, and their works around 1900 were an indication
of what was to appear in the next few decades.
Hoffman's austere Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905-11), with its mosaic murals
by Gustav 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.
In 1910, these concepts were introduced
in Paris at a louvre exhibition of decorative arts from Munich and
Vienna. 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, which was almost
the antithesis of art nouveau.
Another significant event took place in Paris in 1910; 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 from the fashion world for exoticism, that
was answered by the couturier Paul
Poiret.
In 1912, Poiret created his own design
school, the Atelier Martine, to expand his art deco ideas. 
By the 1920s, the effects of cubist
painting were seen in advertising and product designs. Coco Chanel
used cubist colors and forms in creating women's fashions, which
she dressed with art deco jewelry.
African sculpture and ancient Egyptian and Southwest American Indian arts
all had their influence on art deco in this decade, as did archaic
Greek art.
After 1925, the influence of Bauhaus
and the international style, took art deco to a final stage of development
that reflected the industrial age; achieving a reconciliation of
the arts and machine production that had troubled artists and designers
since the Industrial Revolution began.
|
