Chrysler Building elevator doors 1930
Les Années 25 1966
Minneapolis exhibit 1971
Paris fair 1925
L’Art Nouveau entrance 1895
Vienna Secession poster 1902
Picasso painting 1910
Ruhlmann cabinet 1923
L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion 1925
Tutankhamun tomb vessel found 1922
Hollywood film set 1928
Empire State Building lobby mural 1931
Rockefeller Center 1933
Carbide and Carbon Building blueprint 1928
Da Silva Bruhns carpet 1930
Deskey lamp 1927
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Art Déco
Like the words “Baroque” and “Renaissance”, this stylistic term came much later. Though the originators of Art Déco never used the moniker, they knew they were creating something different and instead spoke of “the modern way” or the word “modernistic” in describing these more extreme looks.
Historians have pointed out that the Jazz Age decoration of the early 20th century was first listed in the Les années ’25 catalogue in an essay for an exhibition at the decorative arts museum in Paris in 1966. Its English language beginnings appeared in the title of a book by London’s Bevis Hillier in 1968 but the term’s start was primarily marked through the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s exhibition of June-September 1971: The World of Art Déco.
Origins
Though the 1925 Paris fair, Exposition Internationale Des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, is credited with giving “Art Déco” its name, its roots were planted far earlier. Since at least the 17th century, decorative arts had been a governmental symbol of the French identity. But by the end of the 19th century, the accepted decorative look was the revival of classic forms, primarily the “Louis XVI” styles.
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The consumer-driven society had started to develop during the last few decades of the 19th century. And the French government saw the new 20th century’s turn as an opportunity to return the nation to its design supremacy in contemporary work. The new century saw the market bloom in France with its decorative art celebrating “speed” and demonstrating the essence of “newness.” Likewise, fine art also evolved from its 19th century craving of tradition for something different.
Galeries Lafayette pavilion 1925
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Art Nouveau
Though William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement should be credited with starting the alternative design trajectory in the 1860s, many of England’s other decorative arts producers looked backward to an imagined medieval perfection. However, it was Belgium’s new design and the recognition of earlier Japanese art that pointed forward and to a more modern point of view.
It was a luxurious French store that gave the earlier modernist style its name. Opened in 1895, “L’Art Nouveau” was a breakaway from historicist looks. The owner, Siegfried Bing, sold some of the most extreme versions of this nature inspired “whiplash” furniture from Belgium and France (parodied as “Noodle Style”) to his richest clients. By 1905, the death of Bing and the lack of his P.R. push caused Art Nouveau to fall into decline, but a change was in the air and the newly unspooling century inspired even middle-class Parisians to still look forward instead of backward.
Vienna Secession
One current the French rarely discussed but certainly noticed was what was happening in Vienna. Begun in 1897 by artists, Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser, and architects that included Josef Hoffman and Otto Wagner, the Vienna Secession was a breakaway design group suspiciously similar to the 1860’s “Salon des Refusés” that lead to Impressionism in painting.
With the Secessionists’ founding of the “Wiener Werkstätte” for the commercial sale of modern decorative arts in 1903 and, in 1907, becoming a founding member of Germany’s “Deutscher Werkbund,” France was surpassed in contemporary design.
Shortly after the turn-of-the-century, the Secessionists looked to Glasgow’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh as perhaps the greatest designer of the time and included his work in their eighth exhibition.
It was one thing to look down on England’s decorative arts, but Scotland was probably the last straw.
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Cubism
By 1907, Picasso, along with fellow painter Georges Braque, had experimented with African art and the geometrical expression of the human form inventing “Cubism.” By 1911, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann was showing his one-of-a-kind furniture at the Salon d’Automne and Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes troupe was touring Europe with abstract costumes and wildly colorful sets by Léon Bakst.
1914’s World War I interrupted the artistic frivolity. The entire social order was upended by its numerous deaths along with Europe’s economic collapse. Art dealers thought that Cubism was considered “too German” and a years-long self-reflective period at the end of the war from 1918 led to a pause in the marketplace.
Léon Bakst 1912
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The 1925 Fair
First conceived in 1910 as the French response to Munich’s 1908 applied arts exhibition, a fair was planned by the government near the beginning of 1915. Its delayed 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held at the foot of Les Invalides instead became its swan song near the style’s end. It contained not only Ruhlmann’s Collector’s pavilion of luxurious and highly styled rooms in a slightly classical approach but also Le Corbusier’s cool white cube of the New Spirit pavilion with severe bentwood chairs and Cubist paintings. While one celebrated money, the other was all about philosophy.
The fair also gave the top department stores pride of place along the main axis for the most visited areas while consigning the Le Corbusier pavilion to its edge. Exhibiting modernist furnishings by luminaries such as Paul Follot and Maurice Dufrène in showcase tableaux, the stores’ heavily attended pavilions showed more salable goods than Ruhlmann’s luxurious interiors.
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As money has always prevailed, this contest was no different. Small commercial symbols of modernity could be acquired by the masses visiting the fair and soon homes and apartments throughout Europe and America showcased modernistic vanity sets, enamel purses, and painted metallic ladies posing on alabaster.
Bon Marché pavilion 1925
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The architecture of these pavilions (though each roughly the same size) flamboyantly housed the tableaux with marbleized walls, domed halls, and glass fountains looking quite as permanent as the stores themselves even though they were constructed of flimsy wallboard and paint. And France seemed to accept the modernistic update of classical forms as a normal evolution.
While England possessed brilliant designers of the new architecture, furniture, and decorative products, the government only built a single pavilion at the fair, ignoring Modernism at all costs. A fair such as this, with its state funding for a modern showcase and vast crowds in the center of town, could never have happened in London in 1925. Society in England was more comfortable with tradition rather than novelty, even presenting its sole pavilion/tearoom in the fair in an Elizabethan style.
American Art Déco
The United States, though, saw the Jazz Age as an American phenomenon. The new setback skyscrapers were ornamented in the new “modernistic” approaches instead of the more expensive and visually inappropriate Classical forms.
With the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, Egyptian art was deemed more stylish for the friezes outside and murals inside with their angular, two-dimensional forms. Coincidental with the appreciation of Native American decoration, it led to a wild pastiche of sphinxes, Navajo designs, and waterfalls.
The heightened commercialism of the American marketplace meant its shops emulated the high-end French department stores in their outward appearance but actually sold more English zig-zag looks with low-end pricing. American shops sold modernistic bar equipment and table lamps at all price points to visiting tourists. In the twenties, Des Moines housewives could feel they were as modern as Broadway musical stars while placing their snazzy new purchase on top of Grandma’s Victorian table.
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Hollywood
By the mid and late 1920s, American movie set designers were using simplified black and white shapes to communicate modernity and luxury to a worldwide audience. It didn’t matter that the authentic rich were living in antique-looking Renaissance palazzos on top of modern skyscrapers. In the movies, they lived in swank modern apartments with shiny black floors.
Hollywood film set 1935
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Architecture
The unrealistic financial expectations masked the dark clouds on the horizon and because of the long gestation period of architecture from its first napkin sketch to the opening of the doors, it also hid the economic crash of October 1929.
BARCLAY-VESEY BUILDING
In what has become known as the first Art Déco skyscraper in New York City, Ralph Walker’s 1922-1927 Barclay-Vesey (now Verizon) Building in Lower Manhattan demonstrated that Walker was able to find beauty in the 1916 zoning laws. Called the “State Zoning Enabling Act,” the setback principle was the political response to the newly derided construction technology allowing sheer walls rising 500 feet from the street.
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The client, New York Telephone, also dictated the shape of this mountain of a building. Its switching equipment in the center didn’t require windows or light courts for huge floor plates of the first ten 40,000-square-foot levels. Since the lower floors were bigger than the normal lot size, an open sidewalk arcade lined with Guasatvino tiles provided room for pedestrians. And the smaller setback tower above was in a more human scale with windows set within eyeshot of its elevator core.
Considered an icon of Art Déco today, Walker’s building actually used modernized floral and animal motifs in its ornament. However, he saw the setback massing alone accomplishing its primary look. The limestone and terracotta finials atop the piers and tower mirrored the décor of the lobby utilizing very few geometric details and instead pictured more vines and elephants.
Barclay-Vesey Building 1922-27
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FULLER BUILDING
In September 1929, the month before the world changed with the stock market collapse, Walker & Gillette’s setback forty-story building at the corner of New York’s Madison Avenue and 57th Street opened its doors to the Fuller Construction Company. They had earlier moved to Midtown Manhattan into Daniel Burnham’s 1901 “Flatiron” Building at 23rd and Fifth Avenue, which had since been demoted as the center of business.
The new building was to be the first mixed-use tower in Manhattan with vertically-stacked shops and studios in the first six floors behind polished black granite and golden spandrels. Above those vertical salons, art and décor showrooms rose to fifteen with windowed offices occupying the first setbacks and the tower.
The somewhat French lower floors of black and gold are Americanized at the top with a ziggurat and bands of vivid white limestone and black terra cotta in triangles and chevrons.
Fuller Building entrance 1929
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CHRYSLER BUILDING
No tower shouts of the smorgasbord of American Art Déco than New York’s Chrysler Building. Financed by Walter P. Chrysler, the auto chairman obtained another developer’s lease to the land and re-hired the same architect, William Van Alen, to build the tallest tower in the world to house the headquarters of the Chrysler Corporation he controlled.
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The entrances on Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street funnel pedestrians through black granite prosceniums to a dark lobby of red Moroccan marble walls resembling the inner sanctum of a pyramid. To drive home the point of exoticism, Egyptian lotus blooms in metal and wood inlays cover the elevator doors.
The brick cladding above the first four limestone floors is a quilt of horizontal black and white bands and chevrons. Brick automobiles racing around the thirty-first floor display actual Chrysler hubcaps.
Chrysler Building gargoyle 1930
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The corners of that same floor wave finials of winged metallic radiator caps. And the steel gargoyles of the sixty-first are made in the form of Plymouth hood ornaments.
In October 1929, the nickel-chromium spire was winched up through the crown’s empty center to reach 1,048 feet and overnight took the title of “World’s Tallest Building” from a competing downtown skyscraper. However, the Chrysler Building only held that status for less than a year.
Despite its opening in 1930, both Chrysler and Van Alen created the quintessential skyscraper of the 1920s. From a time of wild fantasy in the vertical Jazz Age ornament during the “Roaring Twenties” to a sober “Depression Modern” of the 1930s, horizontal and asymmetrical movement symbolized the new architecture.
Chrysler Building spire 1930
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When some U.S. construction resumed, Art Déco had transformed to a simpler streamlined Modernism shortly after the financial crash and first years of the Great Depression. Though the post offices, bus stations, and hotels that followed in the 1930s have been lumped into the category of “Art Déco,” the architecture and appliances of that time found their simplified look grow from altogether different roots.
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ROCKEFELLER CENTER
One corporate project was so big, however, it changed world architecture. In the late 1920s, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., acquired the lease from Columbia University of 12 acres on three enormous blocks they owned along Fifth Avenue.
The land without the later grid of streets was originally granted in 1802 to a horticulturist from the then-named Columbia College for a public botanical garden. But over a century later, and after a West 57th Street design by Joseph Urban for a new Metropolitan Opera house had collapsed, Rockefeller took over a plan for the opera to build a new theater at the middle of the Fifth Avenue complex to be named “Metropolitan Square.”
Rockefeller Center newel post 1933
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SUPERBLOCK
One idea in the 1929 Metropolitan Square designs showed a raised “superblock” showing the foyer of the opera house elevated from the street level with arched bridges across side streets to separate pedestrians from automobiles. But the stock market crash of October caused the opera house relocation to be cancelled by December and Radio City Music Hall replaced it as the center’s biggest theater. However, instead of the opera house as the central structure, a seventy-story slab placed on end to fit the east/west block and originally called the International Building became the centerpiece.
The consortium of architects lost one firm from the group when the Metropolitan Opera dropped out. And in April 1931, the final plans were unveiled and the complex was formally named “Rockefeller Center” by February 1932. But the arrangement of a central “donut hole” of gardens, fountains, and sculptures woven into the existing street grid remained from the opera house’s grand Fifth Avenue vista.
Radio City marquee 1933
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30 ROCK
The main building at 30 Rockefeller Center was then named the “RCA” and became one of Raymond Hood’s final projects, leaving the name “International” to another skyscraper. The RCA building’s design was given one requirement: That each office should be no more than 27.5 feet from a window.
It created the “slab” effect of a very thin and long plan for the tower. And because Manhattan’s blocks are long, thin horizontals, the narrowness of the building from the eastern view makes it also appear to be taller than it is.
Since the addition of an open plaza removed the setback-zoning requirement, the trademark side stairsteps of the building, in addition to following the shortened elevator shafts as it progressed upward, are mainly aesthetic choices.
The center’s simplified architecture of limestone-clad high-rises surrounding an open space demonstrated that it wasn’t a particular building like the ancient Greek approach to architecture but the arrangement of separate buildings like Rome’s Forum that could dramatize the urban experience.
Rockefeller Plaza 1933
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However
Purists will say that there’s no such thing as Art Déco architecture, only modernist, steel cage structures with Art Déco ornament; that even the 1925 fair was constructed with modern steel skeletons, and the temporary nature of its pavilions meant that only the surfaces of those structures could showcase its modern decoration.
That explains the “skin deep” cosmetics of the new stylistic forms. But this fails to mention that classical columns and pediments made of stone or cast iron and hung as a curtainwall over modern steel cages could also be called “revivalist architecture” by the same purists.
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Perfume flacon 1920s
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Conclusion
There is no typical American Art Déco, however. Architecture’s 1920s’ and 1930s’ skyscrapers could express the cool stainless steel and limestone verticality of the Empire State Building as well as the flamboyant gold leaf waterfall finials of Chicago’s Carbide and Carbon Building. The symbols of Modernism could be either the embossed French tapestry friezes of New York’s Chanin Building or the wildly theatrical interior décor of Radio City Music Hall.
But from the swank interiors of English hotels to sleek ocean liners to governmental statehouses and city halls in American cities, Art Déco was used to communicate a philosophy of progressiveness. As the “new” has propelled all design movements, Art Déco’s looks have been a remarkably resilient marketing tool.
Now old enough to have seen several revivals, it appears that it may stick around for yet another.
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