STAND BACK; HERE COMES ART DECO

THE FUTURE - AND IT WORKED!

Poster for the 1926 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs Modernes.

Now that the Olympics are out of the way, Parisians are gearing up for the next big cultural event, the centenary of the 1925 Exposition International des Arts Decoratifs Modernes that gave us art deco.

           To the French, “deco” just means “decoration” ; DIY  - painting the spare room; laying a new stair carpet. Art  deco, however, is something else:  a revolution that transformed industrial design, fashion, architecture,  graphic art and cinema. It inspired the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Centre, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the automobiles of Studebaker and Buick, Coty perfume flagons, Radiola gramophones, and a billion ashtrays, cigarette lighters, chocolate boxes, comic books and toys.

           Art deco began as a French attempt to stem the rise of German design and technology after World War One. Synthetic fabrics, chemical dyes and metal alloys threatened manufacturers using silk, wood, leather, silver, ivory. Rayon gave women dresses as vivid as anything in a Paris fashion show. Chromed steel, originally a substitute for silver in the detailing of automobiles, emerged as a material in its own right. Bakelite brought the appearance of ebony, ivory and tortoiseshell to hair brushes, picture frames, radio sets.

France planned the exposition to remind the world of its supremacy in design and craftsmanship. For a change, there were no massive halls crammed with exhibits. Instead, scores of white plaster “pavilions” colonized the spaces below and around the Eiffel Tower. They were sponsored by department stores or individual manufacturers,  both French and foreign (although Germany and the United States declined to participate.)  Dazzled, a British visitor called it “a Cubist dream city,  or the projection of a possible city on Mars.”

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, France’s leading designer of luxury furniture and interiors, had the task of making sure everyone respected the exposition’s high ideals.  Unexpectedly, he faced a problem with his own countrymen. There was no agreement on what constituted a truly modern style. In the end, they adapted the classicism in which all had been educated. The synthesis of Greco-Roman design and  machine age technology became so instantly recognizable that nobody bothered to name it. Not until the nineteen-sixties would scholars agree on the title “art deco.”

Automobile manufacturer Citroën paid to have its name on Eiffel Tower. Glassmaker René Lalique built a towering fountain that lit up at night.   The exposition didn’t stop at the Seine. Shops lined the Alexandre III bridge. Couturier Paul Poiret sold his collection of modern art to buy three barges. Mooring them alongside the exhibition, he turned them into showrooms for his gowns, and for the textiles, furniture and accessories of his Atelier Marine workshops.

The Exposition achieved its aims, only to see the crash of 1929 kill the market it created. (Citroën went broke, partly from the cost of electricity for that Eiffel Tower display.) Meanwhile, American manufacturers duplicated French designs using the synthetics Germany had pioneered. Couturiers and architects brought it to Hollywood, where they found it perfectly suited to the plots Noël Coward dismissed as “tales of high life and low loins” or musicals that celebrated, in Cole Porter’s phrase, “the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire.” 

To me, the apotheosis of deco is in films like the 1934 Swing Time, with  Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It isn’t just the set design by Carroll Clark or Bernard Newman’s gowns but the choreography of Astaire and Rogers. I love how Ginger, simply by squaring her shoulders, transforms herself into a living deco sculpture. Frank Lloyd Wright, of all people, got it right. “I believe that Romance—this quality of the heart, the essential joy we have in living—by human imagination of the right sort can be brought to life again in Modern Industry. Creative Imagination may yet convert our prosaic problems to poetry while modern Rome howls and eyebrows of the Pharisees rise.”