Art Deco architecture on Ocean Drive, Miami
Few design styles have been so absorbed, so admired, and even adored, by so many for so many decades since it’s inception.
Art Deco came about through a range of artists, furniture makers and architects converging. There seems to have been a determination to find their way through from the entirely novel Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which simplified the incredibly ornate designs of the Victorians and worked its way through to the purity of the ‘original form’. Arts & Crafts crafts people took their inspiration from nature, using natural materials especially dark wood.
Mackintosh Lady with the Rose Scarf
The Art Nouveau movement (more of this in a future blog) followed, which also took nature as it’s muse, extending the deliberate simplicity of Arts & Crafts and drawing long sinuous forms, twining and interwining into curls and swirls and often having the female form at it’s heart.
Deco Volute Silk Bow Tie
Art Deco came from both of these, using straight lines and angles to capture the essence of these two earlier movements, while creating intensely sophisticated design in architecture, interior design from lamps to wallpaper and furniture and through to fashion and especially jewellery.
Deco Volute Crepe de Chine Silk Scarf
The designs are opulent, both rejecting the austerity of the First World War and looking forward to a clearer, brighter future embracing technological developments and making full use of lots of new materials like bakelite, chrome, stainless steel and aluminium.
Chrysler building in New York is typical