Design

Defining Art Deco

13 June 2025

Joy McCall

Art Deco was an international style as opposed to a movement. There was no defining philosophy, or values, no hierarchy or formal structure. It was not based on a coherent framework or manifesto, but rather reflected the spirit of the age with shared influences.

Art Deco was recognised as a style at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925 and the name being a shortened form of Arts Décoratifs. However, the term Art Deco only came into common parlance in 1968 when the academic Bevis Hillier used it in his exhibition and book ‘Art Deco of the 20s and 30s’.

The period has also been referred to as the ‘Roaring Twenties’, the ‘Thirties’, ‘Les Annees Folles’ or ‘The Crazy Years’, ‘Moderne’, ‘The Jazz Age’, and ‘Golden Age’.

1925: Celebrating Art Deco

View our June 2025 auction catalogue.

RANGE OF MATERIALS

Art Deco was an aesthetic incorporated all aspects of visual life. From architecture to the interior design, with all the fittings and functional items, as well as decorative arts and the so-called fine arts. We see it in furniture, lighting, carpets, textiles, sculpture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, and jewellery. It can also be seen in modes of travel and advertising, especially posters.

STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS

Art Deco was a style of geometry, clean crisp lines and bold strident colours, as well as luxurious materials with polished, smooth, shiny and reflective surfaces. Its streamlined forms spoke of movement, industry and progressive modernity. There was a fascination with exoticism and the celebration of life, perhaps as a reaction to the past horrors of war and the influenza pandemic that followed.

INFLUENCES

Art Deco can be seen as a development from Art Nouveau sharing a high regard for craftsmanship, beauty and good design. Instead of the organic forms of Art Nouveau, Art Deco was more geometric and had greater symmetry in its compositions. Art Deco drew on the geometry of Cubism, the colours of Fauvism, the dynamism of Futurism and the costumes of the Ballets Russes and contemporary life more broadly.