Word: deco
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...various opera companies and magazines as disparate as Harper's Bazaar and Playboy. Now a little old man of 95, Erte still astonishes, as is vividly demonstrated by the delicious retrospective Erte at Ninety-Five: The Complete New Graphics (Dutton; 192 pages; $75). His work is generally labeled art deco, but his wit, imagination and irrepressible flamboyance suggest a more fitting appellation: art Erte...
...Manhattan store boasts some 10,000 items, ranging from $10 wooden stairway spindles to the interior of an art-deco jewelry store for $135,000, complete with display cases and teller's cage. There are hundreds of marble fireplace mantels, pedestal sinks, lighting fixtures, wrought-iron gates and granite gargoyles. There are bigger chunks of history: a 5-ft.-tall, $3,500 brass-and-crystal chandelier found in a crate in Gimbel Bros.' basement, and a 9-ft.-high, 77-ft.-wide chestnut-paneled music room from a turn-of-the-century house in Southampton, N.Y. Cost: $30,000. Antique...
...remember if the spring- controlled hinge would have been on the top or the bottom in 1907," he says, scratching his head. But he does know that the doors, decorated with carved vines, leaves and grapes, will bring a buck in the showroom. "In New York City, art deco was last year," he says. "Now the decorators all want Louis XV Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous sort of stuff...
...offices. The former Tivoli Union brewery in Denver, a pseudo- Bavarian fantasy, is a giddy complex of shops, offices, restaurants and movie theaters. The vast old Bullock's department store in downtown Los Angeles has been turned into the country's largest wholesale jewelry mart, and Houston's art deco Alabama Theater has merely exchanged one muse for another. The place is now a bookstore. Pioneer Square in Seattle, with its raffish characters, is proving that preservation and up-market transformation do not necessarily mean the death of funk...
Take Donald Trump. Trump, who in 1980 pulled down and smashed a set of art deco bas reliefs from an old Fifth Avenue building ("They were stones with some engravings on them"), says today that "a lot of times preservation is used as an excuse to stop progress" and "as a method of stopping anybody from progressing a city." Trump's current idea of "progressing a city" is to put up a set of nine gigantic high-rise towers, among them the tallest building in the world, on Manhattan's old Upper West Side...