Pragmatic Motivation, Decadent Design

Masterpieces of French Art Deco

Metropolitan Museum of Art
No set closing date

‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’, a jewel of an installation within the Metropolitan Museum’s ‘Masterpieces of Modern Design’ galleries, presents objects that typify the slick and shiny aesthetic developed by French designers between the World Wars: Art Deco.

French Art Deco is considered one of the strongest areas of the Metropolitan’s modern design collection. Visually arresting and technically innovative examples fill this small installation. Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann’s furniture ensembles encompass beautiful forms and superb detailing with ‘new’ exotic woods. Jean Dunand’s lacquer pieces have a luminous otherworldly depth balanced with geometric forms. (Both Ruhlmann’s and Dunand’s pieces demonstrate how ‘exoticism’ in the decorative arts dynamically incorporated materials and techniques from African and Asian cultures without the imperialist overtones of visual art’s more overt referencing.)

Jean Dunand, Portrait of Juliette de Saint Cyr, c. 1925, Lacquered wood, eggshell
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’ identifies the high renaissance of the Art Deco era as bookended by two government sponsored ‘expositions’. It emerged from a pragmatic desire by designers to create something with more commercial appeal than its relatively unprofitable predecessor, Art Nouveau. In 1925, looking to stimulate the design industry after the devastation of World War I, the French government sponsored the ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes’. The term Art Deco was coined by shortening the words ‘Arts Décoratifs’, and the exhibition defined a new style of art characterized by streamlined classicism and dignified simple forms.

For over a decade, Art Deco became a worldwide style, affecting decorative arts and architecture, as well as painting, graphic arts, fashion and film. However by the late 1930’s Art Deco fell out of vogue as the devastating effects of the Great Depression cast the style’s sleek aesthetic as gaudy and irrelevant. In an attempt to re-energize France’s importance in the modern world, the French government hosted the ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne’. This exhibition inadvertently marked the end of the Art Deco era, as science and technology were promoted as the key to France’s future success.

Extended wall text throughout the gallery emphasizes this commercial and pragmatic history of Art Deco. One of the delights then, of viewing ‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’, is discovering how luxurious and opulent the realization of these very practical goals was. Art Deco was about luxury trade.

Today the principles of simple stylish form tend to by synonymous with utilitarian and affordable objects (hello Ikea!). However, during the height of the Art Deco period ‘simple and stylish’ was resting your daily upon Clément Rousseau’s Newspaper Table (1924), exquisitely crafted from ebony, ivory and sharkskin.

Clément Rousseau, Newspaper Table, 1924, Ebony, sharkskin, ivory

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The grandest amalgamation of luxury and trade in the show is represented by Jean Dupas’ The History of Navigation (1934). This monumental reverse-painted and gilded glass mural was created for the first-class salon of the ocean-liner SS Normandie, the largest and fastest ship in the world during the 1930s. In World War II, the United States seized the SS Normandie in New York to convert her into a troopship and during this process the liner caught fire, capsized and sank. Fortunately this happened after the 20 feet high, 56 panel Dupas mural had been recovered. Although, the spirit of Art Deco decadence symbolically sank with the SS Normandie to the bottom of the Hudson River.

‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’ is not technically a Special Exhibition because it features only works from the Metropolitan’s collection. However its focused subject, extensive contextualizing labels and stylish design make it feel like exhibition worthy of eulogizing. I do not know when ‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’ appeared, and I do not know when its pieces are slated to rotate back into storage, however it is there now and it is highly worth seeing.

A Small Step from Reality

Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings and Happenings Films
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room

Whitney Museum of American Art
Until September 6, 2009

The first artwork a viewer meets, when stepping out of the elevator on level two at the Whitney Museum, is French Fries and Ketchup (1963). This over-sized stuffed vinyl sculpture is composed of elongated tan rectangles; ‘fries’, draped with an amorphous red pillow; ‘ketchup’. Other works accompanying French Fries and Ketchup on the gallery floor are a fishpond-sized ashtray filled with giant cigarette butts, a giant B.L.T and an upholstered toilet. It is obviously a Claes Oldenburg exhibition.

French Fries and Ketchup works like all Oldenburg's early sculptures; it is a blunt interpretation of an object, devoid of the characteristics that might convey the original's essence. The strips of ‘potato’ are not golden, their edges are not crisp, they do not steam, they do not make your mouth water. In other words, Claes Oldenburg removes the ‘yum’ from french fries and ketchup. Yet the strange thing is that Oldenburg’s works are incredibly satisfying to look at precisely because they so obviously reference the everyday. The charm of Oldenburg is his accessibility. The question of Oldenburg is: why are these soulless objects so appealing?

French Fries and Ketchup, 1963

In 1961 Oldenburg rented a store at 107 E. Second Street in the East Village. He then ran this store as an art piece known as ‘The Store’ in which he sold sculptures based on goods you would normally buy in a store. An eclectic selection of these sculptures (bra, pie, toast, potato chips), made from draping plaster-dipped muslin over chicken wire, is on display at the Whitney. They are crude creations with rough surfaces, weak edges and patchy paintwork, yet they still instantly invoke a personal response as the viewer can identify a ‘small treat’ consumer good. Interestingly, Black Girdle (1961), with its obsolete subject, is almost devoid of its referential quality in the 21st Century and therefore now barely recognizable in this basic plaster form.

Shirt, 1961 and Black Girdle, 1961

Drawings that relate to Oldenburg’s works are hung throughout the exhibition. He is an accomplished drawer. His images have the dull edges of his sculpture yet they still precisely deliver the intended effect. Study for Soft Fireplug (1969) personifies an upside-down fireplug; the ‘plug’ is shown to slump with a soft weight, its ‘legs’ are splayed, its ‘head’ tilts forward. Amazingly, with simple pencil, Oldenburg conveys a material – soft, heavy, metal – that does not exist.

Study for Soft Fireplug, Inverted, 1968

Oldenburg’s drawings are not only formal studies for sculptures he has created, but also fantasies that explore the space between possible and impossible, planned and unplanned, known and unknown. In this sense these drawings are similar to the scripts he wrote, which someone else shot, for Happenings films produced in the 1960s (seven of these films are on view at the Whitney). The drawings and scripts both loosely chart what may happen when Oldenburg’s ideas are realized as form/moving-image, however the point is they cannot begin to express the lived experience of viewing Oldenburg’s more completed works.

A large component of the Whitney exhibition is dedicated to Oldenburg’s collaborations with Coosje van Bruggen. The gallery entitled The Music Room features instrument sculptures Oldenburg and van Bruggen created between 1992 and 2006 (van Bruggen died early 2009). These later sculptures are more detailed and closer to true scale than Oldenburg’s iconic vinyl works. Made from porous muslin and featuring frayed edges, these works seem to breathe as their forms literally unraveled off the wall.

Soft French Horn, 2002

In Soft Saxophone, Scale A, Muslin (1992) Oldenburg and van Bruggen place the stuffed muslin body of a saxophone upon a ‘bed’ made from a painted grey rectangular piece of canvas that has been removed from its stretcher. Like the canvas, the saxophone is also without a ‘skeleton’; as a result its buttons, levers and rods have slipped off its soft body. Or perhaps these buttons, levers and rods are waiting to be attached to the body? The muslin material and rough seams gives the work the feel of a dressmaker’s mock-up, waiting approval for the final copy.

Study for Store Poster, 1961, Store Poster, 1961

With many of Oldenburg’s sculptures it is impossible to decide if they are on the verge of assemblage or deconstruction. Are they studies for, or interpretations derived from, the objects they reference? I think the answer is both. Oldenburg’s sculptures are surprising in scale and material, but they also are comforting as typical household objects we bring into our realm of experience. (On the other hand, Oldenburg’s Happenings films are obscure and, because they push away from reality, ultimately tedious.) A shirt, a sandwich, a saxophone; all made great, not because they are transformed into iconic artworks, but because they slightly skew our understanding of these common objects. It is a small step Oldenburg and van Bruggen ask us to take in considering new meanings for these objects, but an important one all the same.