Word: deco
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...turned into an "About Men" piece for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Occasionally I'll wander over towards the Science Center at Harvard. I figure if there's anything new going on it ought to be there--they don't give away Nobel Prizes for retro art deco coffee tables...
...filled with a stepped facade some 300 feet long and, at its highest, 100 feet tall: a blind screen of yellow limestone, horizontal bands of green ceramic and patches of glass block, with a gargantuan rectangular entrance portal. The architects have so overdone their contextual homage to Hollywood Deco-Babylon that the effect verges on camp. Once inside, things recover: the galleries are large, well proportioned and properly lit, and LACMA's collection of 20th century art -- already the best on the West Coast -- has been enlarged in the past few years with some distinguished purchases and gifts, particularly...
...traditional American frontier of horizontal space was receding into memory by 1920. In its place grew a new myth that supplied one of the core images of American art deco: the conquest of the air, by buildings and machines -- the taming of vertical space. The aircraft, with its fairings and streamlines, became the formal metaphor for a host of products from milkshake machines to staplers. Fantasy piled on fantasy: Bel Geddes, one of the master industrial designers of the period, looked at airfoils and fish and came up with the finned, monocoque body of his Motor Car Number...
...imagery of this "architecture of joy" is one of clean impaction and ecstatic reaching toward the light; not even the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, made as much of solar disks, sunrays and other bursts of radiance as deco America. As the Utopian form to end all others, the skyscraper manifested itself as chairbacks, bookcases, table lamps, cocktail shakers and, of course, refrigerators. That these things were not tall mattered no more than the fact that most streamlined objects did not budge. It was the image that counted...
...especially in New York, the curators of this show have done a wonderful job of bringing all this, and more, together. At last one can see, in full detail, how the mass- produced, democratic nature of American machine-based design gave it a quite different flavor from French art deco, which was less a response to the myth of modernity than a continuation, by souped-up means, of the high luxury tradition of ebeniste furniture. The work of painters and sculptors was far less important to this process than that of photographers, engineers, architects and designers. What epitomized the machine...