Patrick Bade
American Art Deco
Summary
Born in pre-WWI France, the Art Deco style spread globally during the interwar period, reaching great heights in Chicago and Manhattan. It was a style perfectly adapted to the dynamism of the American economy and society of this period.
Patrick Bade
Patrick Bade is a historian, writer, and broadcaster. He studied at UCL and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He was a senior lecturer at Christie’s Education for many years and has worked for the Art Fund, Royal Opera House, National Gallery, and V&A. He has published on 19th- and early 20th-century paintings and historical vocal recordings. His latest book is Music Wars: 1937–1945.
Yes, there is. There is quite a lot of Art Deco I’d say that is influenced by futurism, and the connection is through this obsession with speed and movement and machines. So you’ll find quite a lot of, say, Art Deco travel posters which will use futurist devices or fragmentation to suggest dynamism and speed and simultaneity. Futurism was an Italian movement, which it was created by a poet actually called Marinetti, who published “The Futurist Manifesto” not in Italian and not in Italy, but in French and in the French newspaper on the front of “Le Figaro” in 1909.
Well, in some ways it’s against it because Bauhaus is all about function, form following function. If you’re a real adherent to Bauhaus aesthetics, you don’t want any kind of superfluous decoration. It’s unnecessary. It’s against their principles. But what happens is that, well, 1925, the Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, the Germans were not invited and they were, of course, a major absence. And I think there were two reasons for that. One was hostility left over from the war that had only finished seven years earlier, and the other was, the other reason was that the French were really scared that the Germans had an edge on them with the Bauhaus modernism. So there was no German Bauhaus represented in that show, but Bauhaus ideas of simplicity and functionalism were represented by the Swiss Le Corbusier, his Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau. And so I think the second phase of Art Deco where it becomes less fussily decorated, more streamlined, more simple, is to some extent influenced by Bauhaus principles. In London, of course, we have those wonderful tube stations on the Piccadilly line which are kind of modern deco, second phase of deco I would say.