Art Deco

Tamara de Lempicka, Autoprortrait, 1932

Art Deco was a decorative movement that arose in the 1920s and 1930s throughout Europe and the United States. The style became highly popular during the Great Depression, its luxurious overtones featured in the new and increasingly popular artform of cinema acted like an antidote to the austerity of depression time. The term Art Deco was coined after the design exhibition Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. Having begun in Paris, Art Deco quickly spread to the United States where it became dominant.

Like the Futurist Movement, Art Deco called for the celebration of technology, the machine, and living in the modern world. It drew graphic material from the art of ancient Greece, Rome, the Middle East, the Egyptians and even the Mayans. Art Deco called for distortion, abstraction and the reduction of the subject matter to simplified geometric shapes. In this regard, the preceeding Cubist and Suprematist movements heavily influenced Art Deco. The style is generally defined with clean lines, zig zags, vivid color and stylized floral motif decoration.

Art Deco was not limited to paintings and was applied to ceramics, glass, furniture, architecture, jewelry and clothing design.