I have just spent three years working on an exhibition and catalogue called ‘Art Deco’. People discuss ‘Art Deco’, argue about it, found Societies to preserve it, plagiarise it, buy and sell it. It’s a category, a topic, a commodity. But what is it? Can it be defined as a style? This is a more difficult puzzle.

Instead of trying to define Art Deco, we might simply try to observe and understand it (‘it’ being simply what people call Art Deco). After all, you don’t on the whole waste much time trying to define what’s fashionable. Fashion is what the fashionable (beautiful) people wear. What’s interesting about fashion is what these people are trying to communicate – desire, difference, glamour. So, instead of asking ‘How can we define Art Deco?’ we could ask ‘What is significant about what Art Deco refers to?’ or even ‘What is Art Deco for?’, ‘What does it do?’

It is impossible to study the big issues of the 1920s: economic boom and depression, globalisation of markets, spread of mass consumption, development of rapid communications and transport, new materials, the spread of electrification and industrialisation, mass leisure and sporting activities, social upheaval, democracy and the challenge of totalitarianism without dealing in Art Deco images. These great subjects come clothed in Art Deco, they provide the iconography of Art Deco, much of its patronage and some of its significance. Where Modernism refers to the modern world obliquely, metaphorically, Art Deco refers to it directly and literally: cars, aeroplanes and zeppelins, skyscrapers and ocean liners, cogs of machines and piles of coins; these motifs crop up again and again in Art Deco. At a more abstract decorative level, lightning flashes which stand for power generation, or radio transmission, undulating lines suggesting marine transportation, speed lines indicating fast trains or automobiles, jagged, jumping lines hinting at jazz and the Charleston; these are the decorative stock in trade of Art Deco. And Art Deco designers were never bashful about commerce. Gold or silver were the favourite colours of Art Deco designers and expensive materials their trademark.

Next>