Academic Classical Revival also includes great variety of Late Abstract Classical substyles, whose distinctions are so fine as to warrant collective consideration under the generic title “Art Deco.” They include Art Deco proper, which stylized classical forms into straight lines, zigzags, and vertical accents; Moderne, which emphasized round shapes and horizontal accents; and a combination of these two sometimes called PWA Moderne, seemingly a bureaucratic creation favored for Public Works Administration structures of the 1930s. Art Deco derived its name from the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Moderne—a show most notable in retrospect for its near-total exclusion of representation from either the Weimar Bauhaus or the closely related De Stijl movement in Holland, the two most potent sources of that European Modernism which after 1945 made so swift and so total a conquest of the American art world.
Unlike Bauhaus Modernism, Art Deco’s prime concerns were with perceived American realities and needs in the 1920s and especially the 1930s. No matter how abstracted, how varied in degree of lavishness or economy of execution, its forms were still recognizably drawn from that classical past embodied in the old American National Classical Revival [Figure 1]. The nation’s last great railroad stations, like Union Terminal in Cincinnati, were in Art Deco. The same is true of furniture and interiors [Figure 2], whose whole range has been so nicely summarized in the 1987 exhibition and accompanying catalog American Art Deco by Alastair Duncan. At one end of the scale are what resemble anticipations of Bauhaus European Modernism, at the other, clumsy classical pastiches; but the bulk, the whole middle range, from Donald Deskey to Elsie de Wolfe, is solidly based on simplifications and abstractions of the Classical Revival tradition. (Chilvers, 77-78)
Furthermore, Art Deco designers addressed problems growing out of the Great Depression, whose impact upon American life and culture seems so deliberately minimized in immediately succeeding decades as to suggest a kind of induced cultural amnesia. That was particularly evident in the two great fairs of the 1930s—Chicago’s Century of Progress in 1933 and the New York World’s Fair in 1939. What the American industrial designers represented there were concerned with—and the stars were predominantly Americans and not Europeans despite the Bauhaus radiance already lighting the elitist firmaments of Harvard, Yale, and IIT—was practical, Depression-beating devices: Buckminster Fuller with his Dymaxion auto at the Century of Progress; Walter Dorwin Teague and Norman Bel Geddes with their “Futurama” and Henry Dreyfuss with his “Democracity” at the New York fair; Raymond Loewy popularizing streamlining. Ultimately their innovations were all intended to improve the industrial fabric and provide jobs for everybody again. They were not glorifications of machines or subordinations of human interest to theories of scientific materialism, but “streamlined” practical solutions to problems plaguing human life: superhighways that would make driving easier, cars that would make driving safer and easier, better-looking and better-working radios and clocks and washing machines. Streamlining referred not to some mystical “new Modern spirit,” but to the reduction of complexity to simple, easy‐ flowing shapes for the benefit of beholders and users in every aspect of life—machines, buildings, furniture. Streamlining expressed and coped with Depression economies; it justified harsh necessities in terms of aesthetics, showing how the efficiencies of exposed steel-cage construction or factory-made materials like glass brick could be made attractive to users (the dogmatics would come later).
These considerations operated on all levels. They very largely account for the great popularity of Nebraska’s skyscraper-capitol in Lincoln, stripped down from its original conventionally lavish Academic program to a much simplified version. So speaking to American needs in forms still comprehensibly American, Art Deco had extraordinary appeal in its own time, and an even more extraordinary nostalgia boom in post-Modern times. There is some irony in nostalgia for those Depression years, so helpless, so hopeless, so gloomy with darkening clouds of World War II; but it is understandable in terms of Art Deco’s frivolity, its refusal to take itself seriously, hence its usefulness as an escape vehicle—from the Depression in the 1930s, from Modernism in the later 1970s. It is no accident that Art Deco should be so closely connected to and so obvious an expression of the American radio and movie industry during the decade 1928-38 especially, of which the crowning exemplar is of course the Chrysler Building’s “microphone” cresting [Figure 1], matched in effects by movie theaters in every small town [Figure 3]. And there was a further appealing contrast with the Modern that succeeded Art Deco: it was not primarily addressed to an elite establishment. (Rosenblum 99-101)
Art Deco was not primarily a gallery style, dependent for promotion on media hype; it could also address the sensibilities of apartment dwellers in small towns, people who ate in diners and shopped in five-and-dime stores. It could make business look glamorous. But it was not necessarily Popular/Commercial. Sociologically diverse, Art Deco was also ideologically divided. For it could not only function as a middle-brow vernacular (like its Classical Revival progenitor), but could also serve as a vehicle for high-brow social protest. Art Deco can be seen, among other things, as a visual metaphor for precisely the sort of compromise between radical collectivism and the old American individualism that a whole generation of people educated to liberal opinions and dedicated to social progress were trying to make in the 1930s. It corresponded to the attitudes of “Parlor Pink” people, fond of praising and promoting socialist and communist ideas for reorganizing society along lines supposedly more scientific than those that brought about World War I and the Depression, but hoping to keep their own freedom of action; people who talked about social order without regimentation, especially theirs; the sort who felt everybody was equal but some more equal than others, hence got a warm egalitarian glow from calling their black servants “cleaning ladies.” In short, Art Deco created visual metaphors of a mentality not altogether unlike stock 1980s liberalism; whence, perhaps, one source of those curious similarities between much Postmodern furniture design and, say, Elsie de Wolfe’s chairs.
One Art Deco artist who interested Rorimer was Jean Mayodon, a leading French ceramist working with decorated faience, a fine-glazed pottery. Other French ceramics imported by Rorimer were made by Longwy, a French faience company established in 1798. Its Art Deco designs were done with brightly colored glazes outlined in a black manganese resist with animal, floral, and geometric motifs. Lalique, of course, was the renowned French glassmaker who had opened his own glassworks in 1909, and Rorimer imported Lalique glass to America. Edgar Brandt was a French metalwork designer whose hand wrought iron work made him one of the leading French Art Deco designers. “Hand-Wrought Iron Fire Screen by Edgar Brandt” is illustrated in the auction catalog. It is identical to a version of the screen made in 1924, which was one of several objects in a traveling exhibition of works from the 1925 Paris Exposition. Rorimer acquired his screen in Paris from Brandt, who was a personal acquaintance.
French artists and companies dominated the Art Deco scene because it was primarily a French style, but other countries in Europe had their own special versions as well. Orrefors, the famous Swedish glassworks, produced modern glass as early as 1916 under the direction of modernist painters Simon Gate and Edward Hald. Rorimer purchased examples of modern Orrefors glass while in Sweden. In ceramics, Sweden’s Art Deco style was represented by the Gustavsberg factory under the direction of Wilhelm Kage beginning in 1917. Rorimer is reported to have also been one of the first to import examples of these Gustavsberg ceramics to America.
Art Deco ornamentation was on one level a retort to the spare designs of contemporary avant-garde German architects at the Bauhaus artistic-educational enclave in Dessau. The 1925 exposition, dedicated to the glorification of the beautiful and utilitarian, was cataloged at the time as showing by its ornamentation souvenirs of old French traditions, allusions of contemporary life, and (at least superficial awareness of) issues of the paradoxical geometry of the cubist movement in French painting. Classical ornaments such as fluted columns were stripped down to look more machined, and paired scrolls were given zig-zag edges and a futuristic gloss, because according to contemporary reviews, the 1925 exposition architecture was also meant to show that the French cultural tradition was not only still alive but also ready to reestablish its ascendancy in the new age. The introduction to the official guide to the pavilion architecture stated that, at the very least, the exposition proved to the world the vitality of France, mutilated by the war but intact in its pacifying genius and ready to collaborate on the rebuilding of the world. (Young, 159-160)
The Art Deco style had overtones of high culture. Its fractured lines create superficial visual linkages to experiments in painting (such as cubism and de Stijl) and in architecture (such as Russian constructivism), all involving ideational constructs of perceptions about spatial relationships of volumes interpenetrating. High art interest by Pablo Picasso and other avant-garde painters had arisen in the primitive art of Polynesia and Africa and ethnological museums had opened by the second decade of the century. Archaeologists and the public were in fervor over discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt in 1922. Simplistic references in color, line, and form to other artistic interests of the time appear in Art Deco and were readily translated to a commercial idiom. Reproducible by machine, Art Deco motifs appear in linoleum floors, refrigerator door fronts, earrings, cigarette cases, and floor lamps to be sold at exclusive shops or dime stores.
Decorative art and architectural journals transmitted the style displayed at the 1925 Paris exposition to the rest of Europe and the United States. By the time of the Century of Progress fair in Chicago in 1933, the style had become streamlined. There was less ornamentation, less business in the lines of decoration; the preferred machine image became the sleeker aerodynamism of advanced aircraft of the time. The move to sparer, less ornamented treatment in Art Deco architecture in the 1930s coincided with the international economic recession. Streamlined moderne became the preferred style for the great prototypical skyscraper office buildings in the United States, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in New York City. (Silvester-Carr 192-195)
Vestiges of the stylized geometry of Art Deco were to live on in Europe and the United States into the late 1940s predominantly in the decorative arts. In domestic architecture in Europe and in commercial architecture in Europe and the Americas, the International style (nonornamented buildings of the Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, and the parallel theories and, for the most part, paper designs of Le Corbusier) was to become ascendant from 1945 through the late 1970s. Only in the late 1960s and 1970s did Art Deco receive any widespread popular approval again or become the subject of serious scholarly analysis. By then, its importance was recognized as being le dernier cri of the French decorative arts tradition and as being simultaneously the last decorated architectural style until the postmodernist rebellion of the late 1970s in image and engineering.
How variously Academic designers could adapt and abstract classical elements is suggested in this photo of the upper part of the Chrysler Building (completed 1929) with part of the New York Public Library (1904) in right foreground.
Worgelt Study designed by Alavoine of Paris and New York City, 1928-30, as set up in the Brooklyn Museum. The room is designed as a whole: the furniture, paneling, lamps, and sculpture all contribute to the total Art Deco effect and show the range of Academic Classical, from representational to abstract forms
California early introduced the idea of combining several movie theaters under a single roof; here, the combined Esquire and Plaza theaters in Sacramento, built in 1940, with William B. David as architect. But Art Deco was found everywhere as a theater style, because association with motion pictures universally carried connotations of “modernity.” In theater architecture, Art Deco frequently coalesced with Colonial Spanish and its implications of leisure, fun and sun, et cetera
References
Chilvers, Ian. A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Rosenblum, Robert. On Modern American Art: Selected Essays. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1999.
Silvester-Carr, Denise. “Art Deco Renaissance”; History Today, Vol. 49,1999.
Young, William H & Young, Nancy K. The 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.