Styles: Art Deco

According to James Laver, the British historian of women's fashions, the same dress will be "indecent" if worn ten years before its time, and "daring" if worn a year before, "smart" the year of its coming of age, and "hideous" ten years after. But it will become "amusing" 30 years after its vintage year, and ultimately it may become "romantic" or even "beautiful." The same sort of pattern, Laver maintains, can be traced in interior decoration and design. He may be right.

The artifacts and accouterments of the years between the two World Wars, from jewelry to architectural decoration, are now being rediscovered in much the same fashion that Art Nouveau was a decade or so ago. The Cubist-patterned rugs and lacquered sideboards mother threw out daughter eagerly buys in thrift shops. The tubular lamps and muscular lobby murals that embarrassed board chairmen ten years ago are now sought by youthful cultists and even a few museums. Somewhere along the way, the style acquired a name: Art Deco.

Craft and the Machine. Some admirers of the period value its creations for their sentimental value and assemble Mickey Mouse watches or Coca-Cola trays. More discerning buyers search for pieces of intrinsically good design. At its best, the style marks the first concentrated attempt to come to grips with the aesthetic challenges of the machine age.

Interior decorators, furniture designers, makers of fine glass, ceramics and fabrics sought to tame the new severities of the Bauhaus. They produced work that did not belie its mass-produced origin, yet sometimes possessed the ease and livability of an earlier, less industrial age. While the style of the day was mechanical, some of its most gifted designers, particularly in the 1920s, were craftsmen who produced signed, custom-designed work for a luxury market. Many were French: Silversmith Jean Puiforcat, Furniture Designer Jacques Ruhlmann, Glassmakers Rene Lalique and Maurice Marinot. In the U.S., Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes designed costume jewelry, radio consoles and jukeboxes.

Curves and Angles. Materials and objects proved only variously susceptible to the sensibility of the age. Cut glass, perfume flasks or a bubbly blue glass Steuben amphora look as pristine and crisp today as they did when Gertrude Lawrence was taking her first bows. Ceramie platters with insipid doe-eyed female heads and statuettes of languid girls on the other hand, are likely to be valued only by aficionados of kitsch. Certain themes and color schemes predominated: outrageous colors prompted by Léon Bakst's Ballet Russe sets; Egyptian motifs and Aztec patterns.