Why Art Deco Still Dazzles 100 Years On

Before ornament was declared a crime and excised from modernists’ vocabularies, it had one last spectacular gasp in the glitz and glamor of Art Deco. One hundred years on, celebrations of the movement emphasize its complexity. Sitting between a dazzling milieu of precious luxury and an industrial age recovering from a great war, Art Deco asks us to reckon with the place of art and design in modern life.

Art Deco was consolidated in a 1925 international design exhibition in Paris, and it is in the French capital that the most elaborate showcase of the movement’s history and legacy is now on view to mark the anniversary. The Musée des Arts Decoratifs’ (MAD) “1925–2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco” fills three floors with over 1,000 objects. The idea to hold the original exhibition showcasing French innovation in the decorative arts was first formulated in 1911, but World War I meant it was repeatedly postponed. When “The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts” finally opened (the shorthand term Art Deco wouldn’t appear until the 1960s), the mood was less about charting the emergence of a new style and more about selling that style to the masses. Other countries were invited to exhibit, but it was France’s show, and it would be the last time France could claim to define an international style before WWII shifted the center of the art world to New York City. Pavilions sponsored by department stores offered furnishings, garments, and manufactured goods rendered in sleek geometric forms and made from new, synthetic compounds like bakelite, the first plastic used for commercial goods, and nacrolaque, an imitation mother-of-pearl.

At MAD, crowds stalled in the exhibition’s first few rooms, where standout pieces included a 1924 folding screen by Edgar Brandt (L’Oasis) that casts a gushing fountain, tropical foliage, and elaborate scroll work in a streamlined vocabulary of modern metallurgy; it was an object, Brandt claimed, made for “the age of iron” as railroads and steamships proliferated. Items from Sonia Delaunay’s “Simultané” fashion boutique brought the dynamism of her paintings, swirling contrasts of strong color, to wearable garments that prioritized the freedom of women’s movements. An array of Cartier jewels incorporated brightly colored gemstones into bold patterns, loudly proclaiming an era of splashy wealth, at least for some. These objects share an obsession with evoking the speed of modernity, relishing in the material pleasures afforded by a postwar boom and the flourishing of industry.

Other objects, meanwhile, provide a more poignant take on some of the true costs of modern life. Toys built in the Atelier des Mutilés (Workshop for the Maimed, 1915–1924), founded by French sculptor Gaston Le Bourgeois, gave WWI veterans a role to play in the production of Art Deco aesthetics. Objects from the collections of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, opened in 1878, show how France’s colonial activities brought aesthetic inspiration and material resources to the capital. This imperial influx led to the proliferation of “exotic” styles, including furniture designer Marcel Coard’s python skin-covered desk from 1925.

Still, a new guard was on the horizon, and at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, another exhibition stages the architectural debates that played out across the 1925 exhibition’s grounds. “Paris 1925: Art Deco and its Architects” recreates the physical landscape of the exhibition, which stretched across the Seine from Les Invalides to the Grand Palais in a series of temporary pavilions. While the department store structures replicated the ornate dynamism of the objects they contained, one display stood apart: Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier mounted a pavilion to celebrate the architectural review he and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret founded in 1920, L’Esprit nouveau. L’Esprit nouveau heralded the decline of decoration and the triumph of a purified architecture for the machine age. The resulting stark white edifice with square windows, built of standard, prefabricated materials, was considered so unappealing a fence was constructed to partially conceal it.

Against the machinic purity of Le Corbusier, designed for a rational life, the lustrous objects at MAD seem oriented toward the sensual, intended primarily to stoke desire: desire to shop, to travel, to redecorate, or in short, to live within the capitalist dreamworld we continue to inhabit. And the relevance of Art Deco for the present is underscored in the exhibition’s extravagant culmination, a tribute to the Orient Express. The luxe train service is currently being restored to service with renovations led by French architect Maxime d’Angeac, and some of his reimaginings of the train line’s early Art Deco interiors are staged within the museum alongside the originals. Like many of the visitors to the 1925 exhibition who came to admire objects they would never own, most of us ogling the dining car’s sumptuous fabrics, lustrous surfaces, and elegant tableware won’t actually be able to afford a journey on the train. But Art Deco was never about practicality, much to the ire of those like Le Corbusier who wanted architecture to have a higher purpose than delight. Offering an escapist fantasy in the wake of WWI, it’s no surprise that the movement once again appeals.