Art deco gave veneer and frivolity a bad name

The jazz style was the blowsy filling between the noxious crusts of two world wars. More than 30 years passed between its flourishing and its remonikered second coming as art deco, no longer gaudy ephemera, now a legitimate addition to the inventory of fashions. The coinage was initially ascribed to the antique dealer John Jesse. It is, more probably, Bevis Hillier’s. He was a scholar of the style, then organiser of its first retrospective, far ahead of the game, in Minneapolis-St Paul in 1971. The Twin Cities rival Tulsa in their abundance of ziggurats, sunbursts, sans-serif signs (favoured for appearance rather than function), streamlined-everything to effect a quick getaway, bas-relief depictions of heroic labourers that recall the USSR and Nazi Germany (art deco, like many architectural idioms across the ages, transcends opposing regimes).

Styles are indiscriminate, meaningless, and they invariably triumph over myth systems and theistic baloney, which have no material presence. Art deco was, of course, initially neutral, apolitical, a blank canvas until infected by ideologies or dogmas, adopted by trade or commerce. Everything was susceptible to this style’s seductiveness, indeed its devotees boasted that it was ‘the last total style’. There have no doubt been other ‘last total styles’ before and since. Styles are not apparent when they are all about us and we are lost in the smog of the present; anonymity is a bereavement that causes us not to see. Styles demand distance, woods to tell from trees, taxonomies to guide us.

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Stallholders in Portobello Road and Chelsea Antiques Market were not perhaps scholars but when their eyes settled on a lush chunk of sinuous Lalique or a vitrolite cocktail trolley they uttered a new barker’s cry: ‘It’s dekkaaaa!’ But was it? The 1925 Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes – whose name has stuck as shorthand a century later – was, in the manner of all great exhibitions, a sort of trade fair whose boastfulness belied the idea of cosmopolitan brotherhood.