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Sexy,
modern, and unabashedly consumer-oriented, Art
Deco was a new kind of style, flourishing at
a time of rapid technological change and social
upheaval. Art Deco swept across the globe during
the 1920s and 1930s and created the defining
look of the interwar years. In an era of contradictions
that encompassed both the Roaring Twenties and
the Great Depression, it imbued everyday life
with elegance and sophistication. It transformed
the skylines of cities as diverse as New York
and Shanghai and touched the design of everything
from Hollywood films to clothing to luxury liners
and locomotives. Art Deco was the style of hedonism,
of indulgence, and of mass consumption. Lacking
the philosophical basis of other European design
movements, Art Deco borrowed motifs from numerous
sources--Japan, Africa, ancient Egyptian and
Mayan cultures, avant-garde European art simply
to create novel visual effects. Art Deco
1910-1939 surveys the sources and development
of the popular style with more than 400 color
illustrations and 40 chapters by numerous design
specialists. The authors track Art Deco around
the globe, from Paris to the United States where
it got its biggest boost from mass production
and on to Northern and Central Europe, Latin
America, Japan, India, and New Zealand. The
book's broad focus encompasses industrial artifacts
(the Hindenburg blimp, the Burlington Zephyr
locomotive), as well as architecture, furniture,
accessories, fashion, jewelry, typography and
poster design. Despite the existence of other
prominent artistic movements during the 1920s
and '30s, the authors Tim Benton, Charlotte
Benton, and Ghislaine Wood tend to hang the
Art Deco label on virtually any object that
portrays the effects of technology or employs
color, luxury materials or artificial light
in striking ways. It does seem a stretch to
include Man Ray's photographs, Sonia Delaunay's
textiles, and the movie King Kong in the Deco
pantheon. But the great strength of Art Deco
1910-1939 is that it reveals the social
context of Art Deco and not just its pretty
face. The book accompanies an exhibition organized
by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
This book is the most wide-ranging survey of
what created such an utterly distinctive iconography
- its sources, its varied forms of expression,
and the way it refined and redefined itself
as it spread throughout the world. With breathtaking
illustrations and essays both thought-provoking
and scholarly, it will stand as the definitive
book on what was, arguably, the most popular
style of the 20th century.
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