A book on Art Deco that’s a work of art in itself — but where’s the Savoy, Claridge’s and the Oxo Tower? 

Over the past 45 years, there have been two distinct and divergent approaches to Art Deco. One of them — which was mine when I wrote the first little book on the subject in 1968 — was to treat the subject as a sociological, as well as artistic, phenomenon. As I wrote then, it was ‘the last of the total styles’, affecting almost everything, from letter-boxes and powder compacts to luxury liners and hotels. With that approach, one shows the dross as well as the gold, and asks such questions as ‘Why did the style become so universal?’ ‘How far did it succeed (with mass production) in coming to terms with the machine age’?

The other approach — particularly in favour with such writers as the late Martin Battersby and Philippe Garner — is to concentrate only on the top-quality artists and craftsmen: people like Jean Puiforcat in silver, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann in furniture and René Lalique in glass. That approach naturally commends itself to experts in the leading auction houses, where the prime interest is making big money and taking fat commissions — things that are not going to happen in the case of a tinny Woolworth’s powder compact of the 1930s.

From the first sentence of Norbert Wolf’s book, you might imagine he is going bull-headed for the sociological approach: ‘In the present book Art Deco is not treated under the auspices of the art and antiquities market.’ However, as you leaf through, you will look in vain for ‘demotic’ Deco. There is not a smidgen of Clarice Cliff’s ‘Bizarre’ range of Staffordshire pottery, that mainstay of television’s Flog It! Everything is of tip-top quality, from paintings by Tamara de Lempicka depicting figures that look as if they have been carved out of tinted blancmange, to the finest New York buildings.