Imaginative Reconstruction of an Art Deco Apartment

Art Deco was born in France in the period immediately after the First World War and lasted roughly up to the start of the Second World War. According to British art historian Bevis Hiller, it was “an assertively modern style [that] ran to symmetry rather than asymmetry, and to the rectilinear rather than the curvilinear; it responded to the demands of the machine and of new material [and] the requirements of mass production.” Its name comes from the French Arts Décoratifs, from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris.

It was not an art of the people. Rather it was associated with the wealthy, for whom optimism is a kind of religion. According to Wikipedia, it “represented luxury, glamour, exuberance and faith in social and technological progress.”

Our visit to the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard last Saturday set me to thinking: To whom did Art Deco really belong? I am reminded of the strange mansion set of Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934) starring Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff as Hjalmar Poelzig, the archetypal Art Deco man.

Art Deco Domestic Architecture in The Black Cat (1934)

There were even Art Deco print fonts, such as the following:

Art Deco Type Font

Think about the lavish movie sets of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, set in lavish Art Deco hotels in Europe and elsewhere. These were not places where people such as myself would feel highly uncomfortable. It was a world of tuxedos, butlers, fantastic dance floors, and a spic-and-span shine that almost glistened. It was “high tech” for the technology that was then extant, which manifested itself in the luxury French automobiles on display at the Mullin Museum.

Some of it filtered down to the middle class, but for the most part it represented an aspiration to empyrean social realms beyond the reach of most people.

Still, it could be incredibly beautiful, as in the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka, architecture such as the Chrysler Building in New York, industrial design, textiles, jewelry, and—of course—the cinema. I believe that we are just beginning to understand this movement.

Self Portrait of the Artist in a Green Bugatti (1929)

One of the discoveries I made at the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard yesterday was an Art Deco painter by the name of Tamara de Lempicka. There it was, next to all those beautiful Bugatti automobiles of the 1920s and 1930s: A self portrait of the artist in a green Bugatti. (Although Wikipedia states that the painting is in a Swiss private collection, it seems that Peter W. Mullin brought it, or a passable copy of it, for his museum.

There is something about the smug look on the subject’s face behind the wheel of a luxury automobile that struck me as the epitome of Art Deco. According to the Wikipedia article on her:

Lempicka became the leading representative of the Art Deco style across two continents, a favorite artist of many Hollywood stars, referred to as ‘the baroness with a brush’. She was the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was also able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era.

Below are two of her other paintings to give you some idea of her work:

Woman in Green

There is usually a strong facial resemblance in many of her female subjects. All three of these paintings could be described as self-portraits.

Portrait of Mme Allan Bott at Saint-Moritz