Celebrating 100 Years of Art Deco

“The couturier should be a geometrician,” Art Deco Style notes Madeleine Vionnet once told Jacques Griffe, “for the human body makes geometrical figures to which the materials should correspond.” In 1925, function met luxury, cosmopolitism, and eclectic inspirations. Rosewood, shagreen, ivory, silk, and Macassar ebony reigned majestically. Art Deco was never a single, unified style, Jared Gross states. “Its aesthetic expressions were as wide-ranging as the places and times where it appeared, and as diverse as the markets it served.” The term “Art Deco” has been used to describe everything from a preciously sumptuous ancient Egyptian-inspired jewel made by the French branch of Cartier in 1913, to the futuristic yet functional streamlined outboard motor made for the giant American retailer Sears in 1936—polar opposites in every way. 

At MAD, the exhibition thus revisits the different trends of Art Deco: from the assertive geometric abstraction of Sonia Delaunay and Robert Mallet-Stevens, and purity of Georges Bastard and Eugène Printz, to the taste for the decorative of Clément Mère and Armand-Albert Rateau, and lyrical geometry of Jean-Michel Frank. The show is total, imposing the lines of a style associated with a discernment for materials and the art of living. The “Nef” of the museum models life-size interiors of the future Orient Express, reimagined by the talented artistic director Maxime d'Angeac, interacting with a 1926 Art Deco cabin from the museum's collections. The Art Deco era showcased buildings dedicated to leisure, film screenings, and travel, from Le Louxor cinema in Paris (1920) to the SS Normandie ocean liner. But in the end, “Art Deco is less about activities, events and personalities than it is about things,” writes Jared Gross. Art Deco isn’t a flapper sitting in a café, publicly enjoying a smoke and a drink while applying powder and rouge to her face. Art Deco is her Bakelite cigarette holder, her chrome cocktail shaker, her jeweled vanity case. Art Deco isn’t skyscrapers, jazz or speed; it is objects that convey their essence and excitement. Art Deco is embodied in products—some luxurious, others humble—intended to bring glamour, elegance, sophistication, and modernity to consumers around the world. Here we are. Shagreen, mother of pearl, exotic woods, and frescoes testify to the excellence of a craftsmanship magnified by the 1925 Universal Exhibition of Decorative Arts, with 16 million visitors over six months marking the triumph of what had once been called "applied arts." From Guerlain's Shalimar bottle to Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann's grand salon, extreme sophistication is displayed in materials and shapes combining rigor and orientalist inspiration.

For those who want to extend the journey, head to the Cité de l’architecture & du Patrimoine, at the heart of an immersive reconstruction of the Exposition of 1925: from the Studium-Louvre to the Printemps Primavera Pavilion via the Water Lily Garden, a tribute to a visionary and inspiring era. 

Offering a breadth of insight into this historic period, Assouline’s Art Deco Style is more than a book; it is an in-depth honoring of an art of living, and the taste invented by ensembliers and artist craftsmen.