Art History Week 4- Art Deco

Art Deco
-The term Art Deco refers to a style that spanned the boom of the roaring 1920s and the bust of the Depression-ridden 1930s.

- It affected all forms of design, from the fine and decorative arts to fashion, film, photography, transport and product design.

-Deco emerged from the Interwar period when rapid industrialization was transforming culture.

-This distinguishes Deco from the organic motifs favoured by its predecessor Art Nouveau.

-An assertively modern style ran to symmetry rather than asymmetry, and to the rectilinear rather than the curvilinear; it responded to the demands of the machine and of new material and the requirements of mass production.

-During its heyday, Art Deco represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in social and technological progress.

-  It was the style of the flapper girl and the factory, the luxury ocean liner and the skyscraper, the fantasy world of Hollywood and the real world of the Harlem Renaissance.

- It drew on tradition and yet simultaneously celebrated the mechanised, modern world.

- Often deeply nationalistic, it quickly spread around the world, dominating the skylines of cities from New York to Shanghai

- It embraced both handcraft and machine production, exclusive works of high art and new products in affordable materials.

- Art Deco reflected the plurality of the contemporary world.

- Unlike its functionalist sibling, Modernism, it responded to the human need for pleasure and escape. 

- Deco was also influenced by Cubism, Constructivism, Functionalism, Modernism, and Futurism.

Tamara de Lempicka, "The Musician"

,Chrysler Building in New York City, by William Van Alen, Jeune fille en vert

 1930 by Tamara de Lempicka 

Great Art Deco Painting