Essential Art Deco captures the essence of the style which swept across the globe in the 1920s and 1930s, altering the skyline of cities from Shanghai to Rio, and adding an exotic vibrant edge to everything from cinema and fashion to ocean lines and automobiles. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the book explores the extraordinary visual language of the style. Skilful juxtaposition of source material and iconic Deco pieces shows how designers borrowed from the exotic cultures of Ancient Egypt, Meso-America, the oriental East and Africa and from the man-made world of skyscrapers and machines, developing in the process a new and highly distinctive iconography. Images inspired by the natural world of plants and animals, sunbursts and fountains, contrast with the geometric forms of avant-garde painting and design, culminating eventually in the symbolic idiom of streamlining. Deeply eclectic and highly decorative, Art Deco was all about fantasy, fun and glamour - themes that are celebrated in this attractive book and which still strike a popular chord today.
This exploration of Art Deco architectural design embraces many different times and places in its visual and verbal account of the movement's origins, development, and influence.
This publication, a collaboration of a Victoria and Albert Museum curator and nine distinguished museum people from Australia, focuses on 100 key works from an exhibition of 250 gathered from private and public collections around the world -- and it consi
An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class. Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design. Through this comprehensive approach to one of the 20th century’s most pervasive modes of expression in America, Art Deco Chicago provides an essential overview of both this influential style and the metropolis that came to embody it.
This important book, now available in a revised edition, contains the most complete range of art deco figures ever published. It is based partly on the original importers catalogues and partly on the wide range of pieces handled by the author Bryan Catley - the leading specialist in the subject. Between the wars an entirely modern style of decorative sculpture emerged which was a complete break with the heavy romantic late nineteenth century schools, and was totally in sympathy with the vibrant young society of the 1920s. The use of bronze and ivory for a great number of these sensual figures in no way obscures the fact that many are of exceptionally high quality; add to this their sense of movement and rhythm and one realises that the large sums they now command is a reflection of a discriminative international collectors market.
"Essential art deco looks in detail at all aspects of the movement, from architecture to decorative arts, with detailed commentary on 120 works. Some of these are considered major pieces, others are less well-known, but they are all essential to the philosophy of the Art Deco movement."--BOOK JACKET.
Surrealism, one of the influential movements of the 20th century, had a profound impact on all forms of culture. Containing over 350 illustrations, this book examines its impact in the wider fields of design and the decorative arts and its sometimes uneasy relationship with the commercial world.