Art Deco

Art Deco dazzlingly reflected the swinging energy, lavish indulgence, and machine-driven optimism of the interwar years in France and the United States. Drawing from a rich range of inspirations – the striking geometry of Cubism, the thrilling color and movement of the Ballets Russes, the ultimate opulence of King Tut's rediscovered tomb – Art Deco was a “total style,” influencing the design and production of everything from skyscrapers to cars to jewelry.

The Art Deco style flourished in a wide range of creative practices, including graphic design (Robert Bonfils and Edward Mcknight Kauffe), home furnishing Maurice Dufrène and Jacques Ruhlmann), architecture (Timothy Pflueger and Henri Sauvage), and jewelry (René Lalique and Charles Lewis Tiffany).

Pushed out of the foreground were the normally dominant fine art media of easel painting and freestanding sculpture. Of these two, Art Deco sculpture is most notable, with important public examples including Antoine Bourdelle's La France at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Lee Lawrie's Atlas at New York's Rockefeller Center. While the famous cubists Robert Delaunay and Fernand Leger made Art Deco paintings for the 1925 Exposition internationale, there are only a few painters to whom the term Art Deco may decisively be applied – these include Tamara de Lempicka and Raphael Delorme.

Indonesia boasts one of the largest and most vibrant arrays of Art Deco buildings the world over. The 1930s saw a heightened interest in all things Balinese, as evidenced by movies like Bali Hai and Honeymoon in Bali; likewise, many Indonesian artisans were deeply inspired by the Art Deco movement, combining these sleek new lines with indigenous practices, particularly wood carving, and exports of these syncretic designs peaked in the decade preceding Indonesia's independence in 1945. Several spectacular examples of Indonesian Art Deco architecture survive, including Cirebon City Hall, the Savoy Homann Bidakara Hotel, and Villa Isola.

The Art Deco aesthetic fell out of favor in the 1940s and 1950s but saw a resurgence in the 1960s, and experienced similar revivals in the 1980s and 2010s, with landmark buildings such as the NBC Rockefeller Plaza (1989) and the Smith Center for the Performing Arts (2012) in Las Vegas hearkening back to the architectural innovations of the 1920s, and couture designs by Gucci and Christian Dior heralding the “return of the flapper dress.”

Art Deco objects are also well represented in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York,and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among many others.