Art Deco was one of the most captivating and popular artistic movements of the 20th century. This title brings an original approach to the subject, collecting and featuring some 250 postcards from the 1920s to 1940s from nightclubs, hotels and restaurants to skyscrapers, apartment buildings and airports.
An exploration of art deco architectural design, embracing many different times and places in its summary of the movement's origins, development and influence. Various types of architecture, the author explains, were termed art deco, and their antecedents were mixed and often surprising.
By the time of the great Paris Exhibition of 1925, the idea that an interior and its furnishings should form a complete design--a "total look"--dominated the thinking of both designers and their sophisticated clients. In the later 1920s and 1930s, whole studios were established, notably in France and the United States, to serve the needs of a design- and style-conscious middle class intent on showing off its newly refined taste for things modern and exotic: the richly lacquered screen, the tubular steel chair, the vivid geometric carpet. Art Deco Interiors documents this flourishing of design ingenuity in Europe and America. Using contemporary photographs and illustrations of interiors, juxtaposed with modern photographs of individual pieces, it traces the stylistic evolution and dominant motifs of Deco. Patricia Bayer illustrates the triumph of the 1925 exhibition and the establishment of the pure high style of the leading Paris ensembliers, and assesses the tremendous growth of jazzy, Streamline Moderne offshoots in the United States. Major chapters are devoted to large-scale designs for ocean liners, cinemas, theaters, offices, and hotels, and to the revival in the 1970s and 1980s of Deco as a decorative style.
An artist of wide-ranging genius, René Lalique rose to become one of the central figures in France's decorative arts in the early twentieth century. His extraordinary output - including his scent bottles, vases, bowls, mascots and other statuary, is marvelously documented in this full-scale work. Includes more than 350 color photographs, many of which were never previously published.