Art Deco is the style that succeeded Art Nouveau, enjoying a surprisingly long global life, stretching from 1910 to 1939, and from Europe to America, India and Australia. As the curators of this vast exhibition (over 300 exhibits) maintain, Art Deco was ‘arguably’ the most popular style of the 20th century, affecting everything from skyscrapers, night-clubs, cocktail bars and cinemas, to handbags, shoes and letterboxes. It was a style of contradictions, an inter-war hold-all which was modern without being Modernist (though the two fruitfully overlapped, as in the Modernist icon, Lubetkin’s Highpoint One building in Highgate), frivolous in some manifestations, austere in others, hand-crafted yet industrially moulded and mass-produced, universal yet individual.
This pluralism makes Art Deco an ideal style to celebrate in our ‘anything goes’ society. Its imagery employed frozen fountains, petrified sunbursts and dynamic zigzags to great effect, and derived its inspiration from Art Nouveau, Cubism, the Russian ballet (particularly a fondness for bright colours: jade green, purple, scarlet and orange), American Indian and African art and the Bauhaus.
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