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.