Deco Doors...and the style itself

Art Deco is all over the place in Midtown Manhattan... not to be confused with Art Nouveau or the Moderne Style..

Here are some points about Art Deco ( Arts Decoratifs)from Wikipedia again...hang on to your hat...


Art deco (/ˌɑrt ˈdɛkoʊ/), or Deco, is an influential visual arts design style which first appeared in France during the 1920s, flourished internationally during the 30s and 40s, then waned in the post-World War II era.^[1] It is an eclectic style that combines traditional craft motifs with Machine Age imagery and materials. The style is often characterized by rich colors, bold geometric shapes, and lavish ornamentation.
Deco emerged from the Interwar period when rapid industrialization was transforming culture. One of its major attributes is an embrace of technology. This distinguishes Deco from the organic motifs favored by its predecessor Art Nouveau.
Historian Bevis Hillier defined Art Deco as "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."^[2]
During its heyday Art Deco represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in social and technological progress.

Contents

Etymology

The first use of the term Art Deco has been attributed to architect Le Corbusier who penned a series of articles in his journal L'Esprit nouveau under the headline 1925 Expo: Arts Déco. He was referring to the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts).^[3]
The term was used more generally in 1966 when a French exhibition celebrating the 1925 event was held under the title Les Années 25: Art Déco/Bauhaus/Stijl/Esprit Nouveau.^[4] Here the phrase was used to distinguish French decorative crafts of the Belle Epoque from those of later periods.^[3] The term ‘Art Deco’ has since been applied to a wide variety of works produced during the Interwar period (L'Entre Deux Guerres), and even to those of the Bauhaus in Germany. However Art Deco originated in France. It has been argued that the term should be applied to French works and those produced in countries directly influenced by France.^[5]
Art Deco gained currency as a broadly applied stylistic label in 1968 when historian Bevis Hillier published the first book on the subject: Art Deco of the 20s and 30s.^[2] Hillier noted that the term was already being used by art dealers and cites The Times (2 November 1966) and an essay on Les Arts Déco in Elle magazine (November 1967) as examples of prior usage.^[6] In 1971 Hillier organized an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts then published a book about it: The World of Art Deco.^[7]

Origins

Joseph Csaky, Deux figures, 1920, relief, limestone, polychrome, 80 cm. Exhibited Léonce Rosenberg, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne (1920), now at Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Some historians trace Deco's roots to the Universal Exposition of 1900.^[8] After this show a group of artists established an informal collective known as La Société des artistes décorateurs (Society of Decorator Artists) to promote French crafts. Among them were Hector Guimard, Eugène Grasset, Raoul Lachenal, Paul Bellot, Maurice Dufrêne, and Emile Decoeur. These artists are said to have influenced the principles of Art Deco.^[9]
The Art Deco era is often dated from 1925 when the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was organized to showcase new ideas in applied arts.^{[3][10][11][12]} Yet Deco was heavily influenced by pre-modern art from around the world, and observable at the Musée du Louvre, Musée de l'Homme and the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie. During the 1920s affordable travel permitted in situ exposure to other cultures. There was also popular interest in archeology due to excavations at Pompeii, Troy, the tomb of Tutankhamun etc. Artists and designers integrated motifs from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Asia, Mesoamerica, and Oceania with Machine Age elements.^{[13][14][15][16][17][18]}
Deco was also influenced by Cubism, Constructivism, Functionalism, Modernism, and Futurism.^[15][19]
In 1905, before the onset of Cubism, Eugène Grasset wrote and published Méthode de Composition Ornementale, Éléments Rectilignes^[20] within which he systematically explores the decorative (ornamental) aspects of geometric elements, forms, motifs and their variations, in contrast with (and as a departure from) the undulating Art Nouveau style of Hector Guimard, so popular in Paris a few years earlier. Grasset stresses the principle that various simple geometric shapes (e.g., the triangle, the square) are the basis of all compositional arrangements.^[21]
At the 1907 Salon d'Automne (Paris) Georges Braque exhibited Viaduc à l'Estaque (a proto-Cubist work), now at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Simultaneously, there was a retrospective exhibition of 56 works by Paul Cézanne, as a tribute to the artist who died in 1906. Cézanne was interested in the simplification of forms to their geometric essentials: the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.
Paul Iribe created for the couturier Paul Poiret esthetic designs that shocked the Parisian milieu with its novelty. These illustrations were compiled into an album, Les Robes de Paul Poiret racontée par Paul Iribe, published in 1908.^[22]

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, 15 Avenue Montaigne, Paris. Opened in 1913, designed by French architect Auguste Perret, with bas-reliefs Antoine Bourdelle

At the 1910 Salon des Indépendants Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Robert Delaunay, shown together in Room 18, elaborated upon Cézannian syntax, revealing to the general public for the first time a 'mobile perspective' in their art, soon to become known as Cubism. Several months later the Salon d'Automne saw the invitation of Munich artists who for several years had been working with simple geometric shapes. Leading up to 1910 and culminating in 1912, the French designers André Mare and Louis Sue turned towards the quasi-mystical Golden ratio, in accord with Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, giving their works a Cubist sensibility.
Between 1910 and 1913, Paris saw the construction of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, 15 avenue Montaigne, another sign of the radical aesthetic change experienced by the Parisian milieu of the time. The rigorous composition of its facade, designed by Auguste Perret, is a major example of early Art Deco.^[23][24] The building includes an exterior bas relief by Antoine Bourdelle, a dome by Maurice Denis, paintings by Édouard Vuillard and Jacqueline Marval, and a stage curtain design by Ker-Xavier Roussel.
The artists of the Section d'Or exhibited (in 1912) works considerably more accessible to the general public than the analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque. The Cubist vocabulary was poised to attract fashion designers, furniture and interior designers.^[25]
These revolutionary changes occurring at the outset of the 20th century are summarized in the 1912 writings of André Vera. Le Nouveau style, published in the journal L'Art décoratif expressed the rejection of Art Nouveau forms (asymmetric, polychrome and picturesque), and called for simplicité volontaire, symétrie manifeste, l'ordre et l'harmonie; themes that would eventually become ubiquitous within the context of Art Deco.^[26]
Order, color and geometry: the essence of Art Deco vocabulary was made manifest before 1914.

Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1912, La Maison Cubiste (Cubist House) at the Salon d'Automne, 1912, detail of the entrance. Photograph by Duchamp-Villon

Several years after World War I, in 1927 the Cubists Joseph Csaky, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Henri Laurens, the sculptor Gustave Miklos and others collaborated in the decoration of a Studio House, rue Saint-James, Neuilly-sur-Seine, designed by the architect Paul Ruaud, and owned by the French fashion designer Jacques Doucet: also a collector of Post-Impressionist and Cubist paintings (including Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which he bought directly from Picasso's studio). Laurens designed the fountain, Csaky designed Doucet's staircase, Lipchitz made the fireplace mantel, Marcoussis made a Cubist rug.^{[27][28][29][30]}