ART: If only there were price-tags
Art Deco 1910-1939 at the V&A
Art Deco — a phrase, incidentally, only coined in the late 1960s — may or may not constitute a coherent, distinctive style. What it certainly does do, however, is to conjure up a whole world, complete with sound and motion — the tinny festivity of jazz records playing on a gramophone, the androgynous whirl of Bright Young Things dancing the Charleston, the blurred glamour of a streamlined automobile or aeroplane, the rattle of ice tumbling into a sleek chrome cocktail-shaker, the flicker of a black-and-white Hollywood film, the silken whisper of a Schiaparelli frock against a lacquered chaise-longe modelled on something from the tomb of King Tutankamen — even the faintly brittle whisper of sub-Waugh witticisms traded across the jet-and-platinum state-rooms of an ocean-going liner or Mayfair townhouse by a clique of elegant ghosts transported from Cecil Beaton’s photos, films like Grand Hotel, or garbled recollections of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories. In other words, not only do we know Art Deco when we see it, but the phrase carries with it a baggage that has more to do with literary memory than with style per se. Its avid, energetic modernity is filtered by our reassuring nostalgia for it. At once familiar and unrecoverable, it is a marvellous subject for a major exhibition, and one to which the V&A’s Art Deco 1910-1939 does resplendent justice.
The world of art-writing being what it is, it is possible to get tied up in all sort of theoretical knots on the subject of Art Deco. How are we to define Art Deco? If it really was a coherent style, then what were its characteristics? Why did it start when it did? Why did it end when it did? How seriously do we need to take it? And what, if any, was its relationship to Modernism, with which it overlapped in so many obvious ways? But although the excellent catalogue engages with all of these points, and although the wall-texts (derived from the catalogue) address their audience at an admirably grownup level, Art Deco 1910-1939, I am delighted to say, cuts through every possible theoretical knot with a combination of visual aplomb and sheer enthusiasm for its subject-matter. And indeed, this is exactly as it should be. Whatever else might or might not have defined Art Deco, it was never much interested in high seriousness, in theory, in ponderous self-consciousness or internal coherence. Instead, it was about youth, glamour, looking new, looking marvellous, selling things, entertaining people, and in general having a good time. So the curators were right to let the exhibition evoke all these things while wearing considerable learning very lightly indeed.
Ultimately, the essence of Art Deco is about as easy to pin down as a bead of mercury rolling across a black-and-white parquet floor. Still, a few very broad generalisations seem to make sense. Whereas Art Nouveau was all about biomorphic forms, asymmetry and references to nature, Art Deco swept these things away in favour of order, symmetry and the celebration of the artificial, technological and innovative, while at the same time sampling widely from other cultures, the more ancient or exotic the better. The V&A’s exhibition draws particular attention to Art Deco’s borrowings from the Far East, ancient Egypt, the cultures of meso-America and sub-Saharan Africa — but also to the way in which Art Deco appropriated from European national traditions and from the high art movements (Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism) of its own time. But at the same time — and perhaps for reasons intimately bound up with this eclecticism — Art Deco also managed to travel further and faster than any preceding style. Thus the bibelots that charmed Proust and his more ‘moderne’ duchesses came to be recycled, via cheap ersatz materials and the techniques of mass production, in the roadside diners and soda-fountains of the American midwest; maharajahs, mandarins and the nouveau riche of mid-town Manhattan could signal their cosmopolitan credentials in a style that, for all its shifts in cost and quality of workmanship, was instantly accessible to them all. Cheaper travel, cheap print and most of all film itself ensured the development of a visual vernacular that cut across barriers of class, wealth and geography. Arguably, the tendency to spread itself so thin militated against the development of much in the way of depth, but since Art Deco — unlike modernism — was not a self-conscious movement intent on remaking the world, this did not matter much to its avid consumers, and need not detain us unduly either.
But as well as being eclectic in its sources of inspiration and methods of execution, Art Deco also developed rapidly during its short lifetime, which is another reason why it is so hard to pin down. One focus of the V&A’s Art Deco is the 1925 Paris Exhibition, in which France, scarred by the recent war but looking forward in a distinctively French way, attempted both to re-associate itself with up-to-the-minute modishness and at the same time to stamp a distinctively French hallmark on this most international of styles. (The British pavilion, incidentally, was created on the cheap and at the last possible moment and prompted an explosion of denunciation, almost entirely from the British themselves.) The V&A show presents artefacts and reproduces interiors from several national displays. Obviously there was nothing new about international exhibitions, but in placing such an emphasis on novelty as an end in itself, on eye-catching yet ephemeral effects (e.g. light shows) and consumerism (especially directed at young women) — rather than on technology, education or ‘improvement’ — the 1925 Exhibition certainly pulled together important strands of Art Deco practice. The riposte to this, perhaps, was the Moderne tendency which embraced the more obviously male spheres of architecture, transport and consumer durables of all sorts, and its culmination in the practice of streamlining everything and everything — a playful gesture that somehow made fun of functionalism while acknowledging its allure, the retro-half life of which still continues all around us. Here, too, the V&A show has gathered together a generous but not exhausting compendium of examples. It is a symptom of everything that is right about this exhibition that one sometimes found oneself wishing that there were price-tags on some of the less extravagant items, and that one could simply buy them off the shelf.
So powerful was this urge, indeed, that I am almost tempted to reel off a list of desirables — less in the hope of finding an ERO sugar-daddy with a very generously-proportioned wallet, than as a simple indication of the aesthetic riches on show here. (That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.) First up, oddly, is an outboard motor. I admit that I rarely, in fact never, buy outboard motors — indeed I have never before even looked at one longingly — but John R. Morgan’s ‘Waterwitch’ outboard motor, in steel, aluminium and rubber, 1936 changed all of that, although I note that the particular item on display, once purchased from Sears, Roebuck & Co., has now come to rest in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More conventionally covetable was Jeanne Paquin’s beaded silk evening gown of 1925, the most fantastic essay in gold thread and heavy, hand-sewn rhinestones I’ve seen in a very long time, as magnificent in its own way as a Constructivist masterpiece with more impasto, with variations in texture and tone to which not even the excellent catalogue photos can do anything approaching justice. Some stray ‘panels from a shrine’ in black and gold lacquer were unsurpassable for minimalist opulence, although a screen by Eileen Gray, echoing them, was if anything even more elegantly austere. If I could buy a ‘Patriot’ radio, c. 1940, I certainly would. Anyone writing at Sir Edward Maufe’s gilded and gesso’ed writing desk, with its rock crystal and ivory and silk fittings, presumably would presumably need to write like a particularly waspish Mitford sister on a good day — but perhaps, writing at such a desk, no other sort of prose would be possible? I’d like to try that, at least as an experiment. Finally, there is an ebony and chrome necklace by Jean Fouquet that is more a sort of Futurist slave-collar than common sense would decently allow — sexy, uncompromising and unforgettable. I could go on, but I won’t. Suffice to say, this exhibition is both a reminder why there is still so much Art Deco-inspired design in the world today, and why so much of it still looks so good.
But part of the credit for this exhibition’s unabashed good looks ought to go to Casson Mann, the firm who have built on their redesign of the V&A’s own British Galleries by designing Art Deco. It is absolutely appropriate that an aesthetic so concerned with instant if evanescent effects, the supremacy of style over substance, the goodness of feeling good should have been given a show where everything is presented with a sharp eye trained unremittingly on sheer instant visual impact. It is all here — mirrors, a silver wall, surprising lighting, objects presented on strange surfaces at even stranger angles. No wonder it is easy to feel as if one were in a sort of dream shop! It’s theatrical — in places, indeed, it borders on high camp — but it’s also magically effective in reminding us of Art Deco’s true loyalties, decades before all these gorgeous consumables ever entered the sphere of the curator, the conservator and the academic historian. Indeed, one might argue that the mature, intelligent and sometimes downright entertaining tone taken by the curators — Ghislaine Wood, with help from Charlotte and Tim Benton — is only possible in such a context. I have no idea who is responsible for this, but someone deserves enormous helpings of credit for allowing the playfulness, the compulsive consumerism, the sheer irresponsibility to radiate, as it does, from Art Deco.
So there are really only two points to make about this exhibition — other than the obvious one, which is that anyone who is remotely interested in design, art, architecture or twentieth century history would be mad not to see it.
The first is simply to call attention to the ability of a good exhibition to make one see the world — one’s own world — anew. For instance, the curators are obviously particularly pleased to be showing part of the 1930s entrance foyer from the Strand Palace Hotel, presciently saved from burial at sea by the V&A in 1969, but stored until now. This confection — partially reconstructed for the exhibition — includes a mirrored revolving door, lots of internally-lit architectural glass arranged into steps and columns, and a bit of surrounding festivity. In this context, it stands in for all the architectural manifestations of Art Deco that no museum show can possibly supply, although the catalogue at least alludes to them. What it needs, of course, is for some feline, sub-Marlene Dietrich, platinum-haired enchantress to slink elegantly up its length, festooned in a confection whipped up out of silk-velvet, gold thread and marabou feathers, before disappearing behind some youthful marquess of ancient title into a secret world of cocktails and depravity, jazz and wit and sophistication, about which the rest of us could only dream. This, obviously, is not forthcoming. What is very much there, however, and very palpable, is the reminder of how many Art Deco buildings, Art Deco objects, Art Deco designs and Art Deco preferences still exist in the world all around us. At some level, this exhibition is a wakeup call to remember and appreciate what we already experience everywhere around us, in so many design conventions, so many products, so many preferences for the flat-chested over the curvaceous, for the androgynous over the ‘womanly’, for the young over everyone else, and for the debauched and exotic over the virtuous and ordinary. Art Deco? It never ended. Here we are, still — far too attuned to its ancestral voices, whenever they can be detected amongst the even-grosser eclecticism of the world in which we currently live.
The second and final point, though, is about art and war. Art Deco, by the definition of this exhibition, grew up on the eve of one war, and died out at the dawn of another. As a style, stances regarding youth, technology and social stratification can be seen in retrospect to have carried with them the scars of that earlier war, and perhaps even premonitions of the later one. Neither point is really addressed in the exhibition. And here, perhaps, is the ultimate and most remarkable example of enactment for which the V&A ought to be congratulated — the most extreme point along which its willingness to collaborate rather than critique can possibly be gauged. Art Deco, I think, was first and foremost a commentary on war — but a commentary that said, first and foremost, ‘let’s not mention it.’ Art Deco turned the manufacturing techniques of wartime towards the production of cheap but beautiful cameras and bracelets and book-jackets; it gnawed at and swooped over national boundaries while at the same time delineating them; it cried out ‘carpe diem!’, if only because so many no longer could. Anti-intellectual, anti-theoretical, its cheap methods of diffusion and dissemination, its catholic inarticulacy and its elegant unconcern with anything made their own sorts of points. Sadly, but obviously, this only adds gravity to its impact today. Art Deco 1910-1939 is an intelligent, subtle, lavishly attractive exhibition, and one that is highly recommended.
Bunny Smedley, March 28, 2003 04:33 PM