Art Deco named a style decades after its Paris heyday
Short for Arts décoratifs, the look bloomed from 1910s Paris through the 1920s and early 1930s on skyscrapers, liners, jewelry, and radios. The label itself only stuck after a 1966 Paris show and Bevis Hillier's 1968 book—long after chrome, ivory, and zigzag towers had defined the Jazz Age.
Geometry from the Vienna Secession and Cubism met Fauve color, Ballets Russes flash, and exoticized motifs from Egypt, China, Japan, India, Persia, and Maya art. Luxury ebony and ivory sat beside chrome plating, stainless steel, and plastic. New York's Chrysler and Empire State buildings are its monuments, yet the biggest cluster of Deco buildings anywhere is in Miami Beach. A key prototype was Josef Hoffmann's Stoclet Palace in Brussels, built 1905–1911 with marble-clad concrete and mosaic friezes by Gustav Klimt.
The style grew out of a fight for status. France recognised furniture makers, jewellers and textile designers as artists in 1875, and the Société des artistes décorateurs, founded in 1901, gave them authorship rights equal to painters. Worried by cheap German furniture imports, the society proposed in 1911 a grand exhibition of strictly modern work for 1912. It slipped to 1914, then the war intervened, and the show finally opened in Paris in 1925, lending its name to the whole movement.
Reinforced concrete freed façades from heavy columns: François Coignet poured an early concrete house near Paris in 1853, Joseph Monier added iron mesh in 1877, and Auguste Perret's 1913 Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was mocked by one critic as a Zeppelin on the Avenue Montaigne. Perret also pioneered facing concrete with ceramic tiles, and a young Le Corbusier learned the material as a draftsman in his studio. Cheaper plate glass and mass-produced aluminium widened windows and lightened frames.
Depression years pushed a sleeker Streamline Moderne of curves and polished hulls, and after World War II began the unadorned International Style took over. In its own day nobody said Art Deco; people called it style moderne. Dealers and Elle magazine were using the phrase before Hillier made it academic, and Mike Hope lists dozens of rival nicknames from Zigzag Moderne to Ocean Liner Style.
Source: Art Deco
