Collection: Art Deco & American Modernism

Art Deco took its name from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and ran as the dominant design idiom of the interwar period. It synthesised the geometric vocabulary of Cubism, the machine optimism of Futurism and Constructivism, and the streamlined ornament that the early twentieth century associated with luxury, travel, and the metropolitan city. Architecture, jewellery, fashion, advertising, and graphic art moved within a single coherent language.

Parisian Art Deco set the standard for refinement, with Tamara de Lempicka's portraits, Erté's costume and stage designs, and the lithographic posters of Cassandre defining the visual signature of the period. American Modernism developed its own register in the same years, joining Deco geometry to the skyscraper, the locomotive, and the popular magazine cover. Maxfield Parrish and the great American illustrators of the period belong to this wider field, even when their style sits at the figurative end of it.

Bauhaus teaching, Precisionism, the Ashcan School's later phases, the Harlem Renaissance, and Regionalism all overlap the period. Each gave the same machine age idiom a particular accent. The Bauhaus formalised the geometric grammar; Precisionism applied it to American industrial subjects; the Harlem Renaissance carried it into the visual culture of Black modernity; Regionalism returned it to the rural Midwest. Streamline Moderne extended the curve into household objects and transport in the late 1930s.

The prints gathered here include posters, fashion plates, and illustrated covers from across these branches. The collection sits between the gallery's Futurism & Constructivism holdings, which fed Art Deco's geometric vocabulary, and the Vintage Ads & Posters selection, where the same period's commercial graphics survive in their most popular form.