Collection: Art Deco & Interwar Modernism

Art Deco and Interwar Modernism cover the visual culture of the period between the two World Wars, from approximately 1918 to 1939. Art Deco took its name from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, although the term itself was not formally adopted until 1966. The exhibition assembled some 15,000 exhibitors from twenty nations and was visited by sixteen million people, establishing the style as the defining decorative idiom of the period.

Art Deco synthesised the geometric vocabulary of Cubism, the machine optimism of Futurism and Constructivism, and a streamlined ornament associated with luxury, travel, and the metropolitan city. Architecture, jewellery, fashion, advertising, and graphic art moved within a single coherent language. The style combined rare materials such as ebony and ivory with industrial materials including chrome, stainless steel, and the new plastics. By the 1930s, the idiom evolved into Streamline Moderne, with curving aerodynamic forms inspired by modern transport.

The Parisian Affichistes, including Cassandre, Loupot, and Carlu, produced the canonical Deco lithographic posters. Tamara de Lempicka built her career on Deco portraiture, and Erté on costume and stage design. American Modernism developed a parallel register in the same years, joining Deco geometry to the skyscraper and the popular magazine cover, with Maxfield Parrish as one of its leading illustrators.

Several distinct American interwar movements run alongside Art Deco proper. Precisionism, around Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, applied geometric clarity to the American industrial landscape. The Ashcan School, including George Bellows, treated working class urban life. The Harlem Renaissance produced an explicit visual culture of Black modernity, principally through Aaron Douglas. Regionalism, with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, returned American painting to the rural Midwest. The principal sub-movements include Art Deco, Precisionism, Ashcan School, Harlem Renaissance, and Regionalism.