Style of contradictions

Art Deco is the style that succeeded Art Nouveau, enjoying a surprisingly long global life, stretching from 1910 to 1939, and from Europe to America, India and Australia. As the curators of this vast exhibition (over 300 exhibits) maintain, Art Deco was ‘arguably’ the most popular style of the 20th century, affecting everything from skyscrapers, night-clubs, cocktail bars and cinemas, to handbags, shoes and letterboxes. It was a style of contradictions, an inter-war hold-all which was modern without being Modernist (though the two fruitfully overlapped, as in the Modernist icon, Lubetkin’s Highpoint One building in Highgate), frivolous in some manifestations, austere in others, hand-crafted yet industrially moulded and mass-produced, universal yet individual.

This pluralism makes Art Deco an ideal style to celebrate in our ‘anything goes’ society. Its imagery employed frozen fountains, petrified sunbursts and dynamic zigzags to great effect, and derived its inspiration from Art Nouveau, Cubism, the Russian ballet (particularly a fondness for bright colours: jade green, purple, scarlet and orange), American Indian and African art and the Bauhaus. It attempted to close the gap between art and industry, focused on the city and the machine through leisure and entertainment, and unashamedly tried to give people what they wanted – a bit of glamour. Never before was an art movement so openly dedicated to consumerism.

The V&A’s stunning exhibition has been three years in the making, and is divided into five sections: Style and the Age, Sources, 1925 Paris Exhibition, Spread of Art Deco and Deco World. It opens with a taste of high style and chic – Franz Hagenauer’s brass mirror surround in the shape of a girl’s head and hand, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann’s gorgeous Lotus dressing-table, all neo-classical elegance in ebony and ivory inlay, an exquisite lacquer jewellery box by Yamazaki Kakutaro, and that apogee of streamlined engineering, a Waterwitch outboard motor.