What Is Art Deco? The Style That Decorated the Machine Age

The style was not called this at the time. Its practitioners used terms such as modernistic or simply the modern style, and the label now universal derives from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, which gathered the tendency and displayed it to an enormous audience. The name was coined retrospectively, entering general use after a 1966 retrospective exhibition in Paris and the publication of Bevis Hillier's book in 1968, which is why contemporary sources never mention it. The exhibition itself had a revealing rule: everything shown had to be modern, with no historical styles permitted, which was the organising principle of the whole tendency, that decoration should express the present rather than borrow from the past.

The vocabulary is consistent enough to be listed, which is part of why it was so easily applied across media:

• •Geometry: zigzags, chevrons, stepped forms, sunbursts, fountains and stylised florals reduced to simple shapes
• •Symmetry and strong vertical emphasis, especially in buildings, where setbacks produced the characteristic stepped silhouette
• •Streamlining in the 1930s phase, with rounded corners, horizontal speed lines and teardrop shapes borrowed from aerodynamics and applied to objects that never moved
• •Luxury materials in the French phase: ebony, shagreen, ivory, lacquer, mother of pearl and rare veneers, worked by craftsmen for wealthy clients
• •Industrial materials in the American phase: chrome, stainless steel, aluminium, Bakelite and glass block, suited to mass production
• •Typography with strong geometric letterforms, and colour schemes running from black, gold and cream to the saturated pastels of Miami

The style borrowed enthusiastically and openly. Cubism and the Vienna Secession supplied the geometry, and Russian Ballet designs the exoticism and colour. The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 produced an immediate Egyptian craze, which is why lotus motifs, scarabs and stepped pyramids appear in cinemas across the world in the following decade. Aztec and Mayan stepped temples fed directly into skyscraper profiles. African and East Asian art contributed pattern and lacquer technique, in a pattern of appropriation typical of the period and reflecting empire as much as taste. And the machine itself became decoration, with gears, turbines, aeroplanes, ocean liners and lightning bolts used as ornamental motifs at a moment when technology felt like the future rather than a routine fact, which is the single clearest difference between this style and anything before it.

Architecture is where the style is most durable, because the buildings are still standing. New York supplies the best-known examples, since the zoning law of 1916 required tall buildings to step back as they rose to let light reach the street, which produced the setback silhouette that became the style's signature; the Chrysler Building of 1930, with its stainless steel crown and its ornamental eagles modelled on radiator caps, and the Empire State Building of 1931 are the standard cases. Beyond New York, the style spread further and more evenly than any before it: Miami Beach has the largest concentration of the pastel streamline phase, Mumbai has the second largest collection of such buildings in the world along its seafront, and Napier in New Zealand was rebuilt entirely in the style after an earthquake in 1931. Cinemas, railway stations, power stations, factories and hotels took it up because it read as modern and luxurious at once, which suited buildings selling an experience.

The Second World War stopped it, and the postwar consensus in architecture and design turned decisively against ornament of any kind, under the influence of the Bauhaus and the international style, which regarded decoration as dishonest. For two decades the style was regarded as vulgar and a great deal of it was demolished; London's Firestone factory was destroyed over a bank holiday weekend in 1980 specifically to pre-empt its listing, an episode that strengthened the British conservation movement considerably. The revival began in the late 1960s with the exhibitions that gave the style its name, and preservation followed, with the Miami Beach district protected in 1979 and the Mumbai buildings inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2018. Its visual language has never really left popular culture, returning whenever a designer wants to signal glamour, the 1930s or a certain kind of retro future, which is why it appears so reliably in film design, in video games and on the covers of books set between the wars.

The decorative style of the 1920s and 1930s took its name retrospectively from a Paris exhibition of 1925 that banned historical styles, and it combined geometric ornament, stepped and streamlined forms, and motifs drawn from Cubism, Egyptian and Mesoamerican art and machinery itself. Its French phase used rare materials and craftsmanship, its American phase chrome and Bakelite for mass production. New York zoning law produced its signature setback skyline, it spread as far as Mumbai and Napier, and it was dismissed after the war before being revived from the late 1960s.