Art Deco Interiors: Decoration and Design Classics of the 1920s and 1930s

by Patricia Bayer

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.

Genres: Design, Art, History

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 18, 1994

Reviews

[quoms · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty solid overview/intro to the most important Art Deco decorators and furniture designers, hampered by bad layout issues. I certainly understand the technological and cost limitations of color printing (in this era) that require putting all the photos into one section at the end of each chapter, but if you're going to do this it is critical to label each one with a figure number and refer to them that way. Trying to cross-reference the text with the images was exhausting and ultimately untenable, as the subjects of the images correlate only loosely to the text and are sometimes presented in a different order.

My other criticisms are academic. Bayer is probably not the first to do it, but she presents haute Art Deco and Streamline Moderne as basically an aesthetic continuum within a single coherent style, giving only lip service to the contribution of Central European and Dutch functionalist architects to the Streamline/Machine Age style, which was more a hybrid including elements of Art Deco than a linear evolution of it. (Consider the bold horizontality of Streamline, with its precedents in functionalism and even in the automobile-oriented Prairie School, not in the soaring vertical interiors of a Ruhlmann.)

Bayer also seems flatly incorrect in her introductory statement (p. 7) that Art Deco was "the first truly modern style of interior decoration in its use of new technologies and materials." Indeed, le style moderne may have been the first movement to explicitly name itself using the M-word - but this elides the overwhelming contribution of new technologies like steam power to the late Victorian interior, as well as the fact that functionalist architecture was far more strident in its rejection of the past than Art Deco (with all its urns, fluted pilasters, and heroic Greek statuary, however stylised). The "total interior" is also certainly not an Art Deco invention, going back not just to Art Nouveau or Frank Lloyd Wright but at least to Robert Adam in the 18th century. It is an architectural ideal that is always time- and labor-intensive to achieve, and therefore rare, but which can be found in the finest examples of any design movement.

The text also has some frustrating blind spots. Along with the functionalists, Central European (especially Austrian and Czechoslovak) interwar interiors are unfairly written off: since this was written when the Iron Curtain was still up, it's okay to say you don't know how Art Deco and Moderne style were applied in the East, but not to say they didn't do anything of note. It's also historically ignorant to express surprise at South America's relationship to Art Deco (and then only treat it in the book as a destination for ocean liners), given that Argentina at the dawn of the 20th century had one of the world's richest economies and attracted France's most prestigious decorators for a whole range of commissions. This would all be forgivable if the book were simply up front about what it is, which is a history of Art Deco in France and the Anglosphere.

But I'm being harsh. The photography is good, and the text compiles the essential names and dates. As someone with only a passing knowledge of Art Deco, I learned a lot. And I'm glad I stuck with it, because the best chapter is the last one: being written at the tail end of the '80s, this book is very well-positioned to give an account of the Deco revival over the preceding two decades. I appreciated the connections that were made here.

[morgan félix · Rating 4 out of 5]

the pictures were really pretty

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

My parents are art deco obssessed. In this book, your just looking at buildings.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous!

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an epic look at Art Deco in interior design.

[Michael Heath-Caldwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book on Art Deco style and interiors from around the world.