The United States had a strong influence on international style, although it had not exhibited in Paris. Streamlining, developed in the United States, was a feature Art Deco. Speed was still smart, and it was evoked in Art Deco design by such devices as closely set, parallel, horizontal lines and fluid, rounded corners.

Vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and buildings were streamlined as readily as cars, trains and ships. The United States was also the Art Deco source of another powerful modern symbol: the skyscraper. Its tapering, staged silhouette was used in decorations on buildings, lighting equipment and company badges.

In the United States itself, Modernist Art Deco flourished in lavish interiors for wealthy clients despite the Depression. Hollywood sets reflected the Art Deco styles commissioned for real rooms and of course Hollywood films spread the vogue across the world.

Antique Collector MagazineThe films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers show rooms where Modernist Art Deco severity is offset by deep upholstery on armchairs with rounded lines; by carefully planned lighting effects from globe-shaped milk-glass lamps and uplights on the walls; and by deep-pile, geometric-patterned rugs. Films of the thirties also show the wide-shouldered, tailored Art Deco suits the women wore by day and their figure- skimming, bias-cut evening frocks held up by shoe-string straps. The men meanwhile wore easy-fitting, wide-cut Art Deco suits.

Suburban People’s Taste

A massive boom in building and home ownership in Britain, mainly through the work of speculative builders who put up some four million homes on new estates around the cities and towns. Most builders tended to opt for safe revivalist Art Deco styles. Modernist buildings with their blank facades and metal-framed corner windows generally provoked public Art Deco outcry.

The new generation of householders in their suburbs were able to make choices about Art Deco decoration and Art Deco furnishing that only a much narrower and wealthier band of citizens had previously had the luxury of making. Industry, waking up to the spending power of suburbia, created a vast range of Art Deco furniture, crockery and tableware, paints, wallpapers and ornaments to fill the shelves of shops. Suburbia also offered a large market for those Art Deco designers who could tap it successfully.

Many of the most collectable Art Deco pieces from the period were produced on a factory basis. The ubiquitous Lloyd Loom products, for example, were factory made; they appealed to both popular and high-fashion Art Deco tastes.

It was a similar story with Art Deco pottery. Susie Cooper added bright, abstract designs to pottery made for her in the Staffordshire Art Deco potteries. Clarice Cliff designed for the Newport Pottery Company series with such names as ‘Bizarre’ and `Fantasque’; the pieces had bold and colourful hand-painted Art Deco decoration but were none the less produced in bulk.

Through industrial design, therefore, Art Deco and some traces of the Modern movement reached the furnishings of a very broad band of homes in Britain, though often in a watered-down version. In their purer forms, however, especially in architecture, these international styles were not much liked, except possibly in a few extravagantly Art Deco cinemas - and time has not made the British public feel any fonder of them.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Art Deco Modern symbol Design Transatlantic Ingredient