Collection: Art Deco

Art Deco took its name from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris from April to October 1925, and it ran as the dominant design idiom of the interwar period until the outbreak of the Second World War. The style synthesised the geometric vocabulary of Cubism, the machine optimism of Futurism and Constructivism, and a streamlined ornament drawn from Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Mesoamerican, and African sources. Architecture, jewellery, fashion, advertising, and graphic art moved within a single coherent language of zigzag, chevron, sunburst, and stylised floral motifs in chrome, lacquer, ebony, and ivory.

The Parisian standard was set by the easel painter Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980), the costume and fashion designer Erté (1892–1990), the poster artist A. M. Cassandre (1901–1968), the cabinetmaker Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, the lacquer artist Jean Dunand, the glassmaker René Lalique, and the muralist Jean Dupas. American architecture absorbed the idiom in William Van Alen's Chrysler Building (1930) and Shreve, Lamb and Harmon's Empire State Building (1931), while Donald Deskey, Hugh Ferriss, and Rockwell Kent adapted it to interior design and illustration. The Streamline Moderne variant of the 1930s carried the same vocabulary into curved chrome and aerodynamic form before the postwar International Style displaced both.