Word: deskey
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...like any good magazine article, it has not just a beginning and middle, but also an end. One of the last things you see is a 1932 replica of a never-built luxury liner by Norman Bel Geddes, who - along with the likes of Gilbert Rohde and Donald Deskey - formed a rising group of distinctively American designers. Bel Geddes' model is the same size as the Normandie at the show's entrance, but sleeker and more futuristic - a metaphor for the passing of cultural leadership to New York...
...portrait of Lenin. Okrent is also supremely funny on the subject of S.L. (Roxy) Rothafel, creator of superabundant picture palaces along Broadway, those Moorish-boorish Odeons, who was the man chosen to guide development of Radio City Music Hall. Once he was in the job, fate teamed Roxy with Deskey--Donald Deskey, the great evangel of Art Deco who had won a competition to design the Music Hall. Dedicated to all things Moderne, Deskey is the man who saved us from Rothafel's stated dream for the Music Hall: "Portuguese Rococo...
...Music Hall had three sires--John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the world's richest man, whose eponymous Depression-defying venture in urban optimism was the greatest accomplishment of his life; S.L. ("Roxy") Rothafel, a monomaniacal showman whose idea of appropriate scale ranged from enormous to gargantuan; and Donald Deskey, a design buccaneer whose best-known work, eclipsing even the Music Hall, would be the Crest toothpaste tube. But what these three unlikely collaborators built, and what renovation architect Hugh Hardy and his colleagues at Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates have now reinvigorated, changed the course of American interior design...
Given that Deskey had first been inflamed by the idea of the modern at the epochal Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in 1925--whence the term (and style) Art Deco--the clothing he draped over the muscular lines of the Music Hall was surprisingly American. He commissioned paintings from America's leading modernists, designed hundreds of furniture pieces in novel forms and added new materials--tubular steel, Bakelite, aluminum foil--to the design vocabulary. Up to that point, the fashion in theater decoration might have been characterized as Italian Baroque Moorish Greek Renaissance Pagoda. Pick...
Oddly, the two finest works that Deskey commissioned and Hardy has reinstalled haven't been on display for years. Stuart Davis' witty Men Without Women was exiled a few blocks north to the Museum of Modern Art in 1975, when the Music Hall was in such a state of desuetude that at some performances less than 10% of the seats in the immense auditorium were filled. Hardy had a potent ally in his effort to yank the Davis painting back from MOMA. Jerry I. Speyer, the manager and co-owner of Rockefeller Center, is vice chairman of the museum...