Art Deco, Ourselves

Antonio Pacheco on the history and theory behind a style that is suddenly everywhere.

This piece is published in collaboration with New York Review of Architecture. You can subscribe to NYRA here.

One night, as a celebratory dinner at the Russian Tea Room wound down, my thoughts turned to the rocks glass in my hand. Swirling a bit of icy vodka, I found myself capturing the moment, reflecting on the shape of the glass itself, its heft, its ethereality. The deep forest green hues and rich orange spotlights of the surrounding room, distorted in the thickness of the glass, brought out magnificent, contradictory forms: a heavy cuboid base rising to a delicate circular rim, opposing shapes lofted together in a graceful form that tapers as it rises. Sitting there, Picasso prints and Suprematist paintings swirling, a wild whisper of an idea came to mind—“Art Deco.”

In November 1932, the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes published a 300-page manifesto for the Art Deco era titled Horizons, a book brimming with dozens of illustrations depicting the spectacular gadgets of the late industrial age. Floating cities, beguiling inventions, mesmerizing patterns. An exhausted but enthralled Geddes writes, “We live and work under pressure with a tremendous expenditure of energy. We feel that life in our time is more urgent, complex and discordant than life ever was before.” Indeed, amid the desolation of the Great Depression, Geddes peered around and somehow found reason to hope for a new age dawned with invigorating conceptions, one in which, simply, the horizon lifted. This tension—between calamity and vigor, between resignation and yearning, between somber night and hopeful dawn—feels eerily familiar. 

Art Deco has bubbled up all over the place recently. It’s the backdrop for period dramas (Perry Mason; Oppenheimer); it’s the subject of museum exhibitions (The Met has two 1920s/30s themed exhibits this year alone); it fuels new creative endeavors (see Justin Peck’s Copland Dance Episodes). Skylines are once again heaving with the stacked and set back forms that hearken to the Art Deco era. I can count at least half a dozen Art Deco accounts on Twitter with huge followings, their feeds full of crowd-pleasing buildings, sculptures, fashion, and artwork from the 1920s and 30s. In headlines, overheard in conversations, sprinkled across real estate listings, everywhere: “Art Deco.”

THE TASTE ECONOMY