No need to strain your neck. Not all Art Deco requires you to gaze upward at tall buildings.
The style left its mark on jewellery, fashion, posters, art and everyday objects too. It had to. In a world trying to distance itself from the Great War, a new optimism and new ideas were racing across continents. A fresh new visual language had emerged amid it all, and, in the design world, everyone, everywhere, was taking to it.
By the mid-1920s, rail technology had sped up to cross 160 km per hour. Steamships were competing to make the quickest trans-Atlantic crossings. A growing class of working professionals was starting to travel for pleasure.
These new services needed to advertise themselves, and the new design language was perfect: fluid, aerodynamic, fuss-free. Check out the 1935 poster for the SS Normandie, one of the largest and most extravagant ships of its time. It projects an unusual front view of the vessel, its elegant curves somehow both majestic and simple. One has the sense of looking up, even when one is simply looking across. It won its artist AM Cassandre almost instant acclaim.
An earlier work by the French artist, commissioned in 1927, paints a different machine with a kind of reverence. His poster for the trans-European Nord Express puts the viewer at almost-wheel-level, making the train loom larger-than-life, white lines and geometric shapes signalling streamlined speed. Only a wisp of steam breaks free.
For those who wished to stay put, there were quieter Art Deco adventures to be had in the shops. Somewhere in the vaults of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is Surfers, a length of cotton dress material from 1937. It was manufactured by Manchester’s Calico Printers’ Association and depicts a series of women, in stylish swimwear, surfing on boards against a bright red background, enjoying a sea with no men in it — a small rebellion, elegantly rendered, for a world in which equal voting rights had been introduced only in the previous decade. Like the flattened figures of Art Deco architecture, there are no flourishes here, no tendrils; the human body in motion is itself the design.
Motifs echoed across objects: A chevron symbol from a wrought-iron window grille could show up on a tiara, in the sequins on a Flapper girl’s dress and on a unisex cigarette case.
More precious pleasures were commissioned by jewellers such as Cartier. The French brand updated its signature East-meets-West style (which auctioneers dubbed Tutti Frutti in the 1970s) for the wealthy and fashionable. No one was more fashionable than Daisy Fellowes, heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune.
In 1936, she commissioned the Collier Hindou, a necklace made from her own sapphires, emeralds, rubies and diamonds, fastened Maharaja-style, with a black silk cord. The necklace was thick, colourful and flexible. Its central section could be used as a clip-on brooch. It reflected the period’s love of geometric shapes. It remains the most spectacular of Cartier’s Tutti Frutti works.
Interior design of the time reflected the Art Deco spirit too. It became a symbol of quiet luxury to have a unified living and working space that featured exotic wood, ivory and precious metals in lighting, stairwells and furniture. Wealthy Parisians loved Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (his was the most sought-after pavilion at the 1925 Exposition). He knew when to go overboard and when to exercise restraint. Consider the iconic Sun Bed he designed in 1930 for the French stage actress Jane Renouardt. White oak and ebony, it took his craftsmen more than 250 hours to make.
Speed, liberation, luxury and elegance all converge in an unlikely Art Deco icon: A 1929 artwork that served as the cover of Die Dame (The Lady), a popular German fashion magazine. The work is a self-portrait by the Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, dressed in a leather helmet, gloves and grey scarf, at the steering wheel of an Italian racing car.
Titled Autoportrait (but also known as Tamara in a Green Bugatti), it is a tight crop. We see only the artist’s face and hands and the driver’s side of the vehicle: a pedestrian’s glimpse of de Lempicka as she cruises past. Wealthy, stylish, inaccessible, free. It’s no wonder it symbolises the mood of the era, 100 years on.
