architecture history

Art Deco: Polemics and Synthesis Author(s): Richard Striner Source: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 21-34 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1181301 Accessed: 07-09-2017 20:29 UTC

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Art Deco

Polemics and Synthesis

Richard Striner

HE STUDY OF ART DECO becomes

useful precisely when the quest for a per- fectly delineated "style" yields to an appre-

ciation of the volatility that characterized early twentieth-century design. Much as the eclectic de- sign of the nineteenth century served as a medium in which very different inspirations and creeds could influence one another, art deco in the 192os and 1930s proved to be a middle range between antagonistic ideologies. In particular, it served as an important channel between radical and tradi- tionalist design responses to twentieth-century challenges.

I consider art deco to be a movement that drew

on design ideas that emerged from the 1925 Paris exhibition and from the streamlining genre during the 1930s. It is well to regard these design impulses as closely related components of an overall move- ment rather than as two distinct movements, es- pecially since commonalities and hybrid combi- nations were abundant by the 1930s, as much of the commercial architecture of the period demon- strates (fig. i). Even David Gebhard, the scholar most inclined to emphasize the so-called zigzag/ streamline dichotomy, views these two as related subdivisions of an overall movement which he

terms the "Moderne."' For convenience, the widely accepted term art deco serves equally well.

Art deco designs were in a middle range be- tween polarized tendencies. Gebhard has sug-

gested that its exponents "assumed a lackadaisical middle course between the High Art Modernists and the Traditionalists."2 This middle range of de- sign could be a freewheeling expression of contem- poraneity. It was a spirit that sought to express the vibrant temper of its times; it sought to capture the haunting savor of life in the jazz age, and later it sought to express the upbeat, modish, "stream- lined" rhythms of life in the age of "swing." It frequently exuded joie de vivre and celebrated progress through technology. But for all its ex- uberance, art deco was not an insubstantial move- ment, nor did it shrink from artistic complexities. At times it captured the fears, as well as the hopes, of the interwar period in Europe and America. Its mediational role was a function of its broad emo-

tional range. Although utopian and futurist aspects of early

twentieth-century design have been amply studied, design historians have not said enough about the angst of the interwar years: the sense among writ- ers and artists that Western culture might be near- ing decline and fall. In a period torn by upheavals, depression, persecutions, and the threat of recur- rent war, many influential writers and artists be- lieved that Western civilization might well be poised at the brink of either a disastrous cataclysm or a new historical cycle. Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, T. S. Eliot's poetry of desolation (con- trasted to the splendor of classical achievements), the pathos of Leopold Bloom contrasted to the grandeur of Homer's adventurer in James Joyce's Ulysses, the cyclical theory in Arnold Toynbee's books and essays-all of this conveys the milieu in which visionary commentators such as Lewis Mum-

Richard Striner is assistant professor of history, Washing- ton College, Chestertown, Md., and president of the Art Deco Society of Washington, D.C.

The author is grateful to Washington College for a fac- ulty enhancement grant and to the following individuals: Tim Backer, Emily Bernard, Carolyn Koenig, MaryAnn Lando, Richard Longstreth, and Tony Wrenn.

i David Gebhard, "The Moderne in the U.S., 1920-1941," Architectural Association Quarterly 2, no. 3 (July 1970): 4-20.

? 1990 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/90/2501-0002$3.00

2 David Gebhard, "About Style, Not Ideology," Architecture 73, no. 12 (December 1983): 35. See also Hans Wirz and Richard Striner, Washington Deco: Art Deco Design in the Nation's Capital (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984), pp. 18-19; and Richard Striner, "Defining Art Deco," Art Deco News 3, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 2.

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22 Winterthur Portfolio

Fig. i. Irving M. Fenichel, Knickerbocker Laundry Co. plant, Long Island City, N.Y., 1932. From Architectural Record 72, no. 6 (December 1932): 381.

ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldous Huxley, and Le Corbusier propounded their theories, fears, and solutions. A knowledge of the interwar period's apocalyptic moods (notwithstanding its equally im- portant visions of technological utopia) provides a much-needed basis for assessing the urgency suf- fusing the modernist, traditionalist, and middle- range responses to the period's design agenda. To be sure, the threat of impending historical

catastrophe affected both radical modernists and twentieth-century traditionalists. While the radi- cals sought to preempt disaster by a bold departure from the chaos of the past and present to a future world of order (as envisioned by Bauhaus philoso- pher designers), the traditionalists sought to stave off disaster by maintaining the continued vitality of classical order.

In contrast, the art deco designers sought to blend ancient imagery-from classicism to the sym- bolic repertoire of ancient Egyptian and Aztec art-with the futurist imagery of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. This simultaneous reaching out to the past and future was highly symptomatic of con-

Fig. 2. Publicity photograph for Cecil B. DeMille's Madam Satan, 1930/31. From Dancing Times (January 1931): cover.

cerns of the interwar period.3 Here was a design that sought to "locate" itself symbolically--and by extension to offer a commentary on its times and its cultural milieu-using extremes in historical imagery as points of emotional reference. What better way to "get one's bearings," so to speak, to conjure with the question, Who, and where, are we, in this turbulent age of the machine (fig. 2)?

Writers of the period also experimented with historical commentary of this sort. Describing Manhattan of the future, John Dos Passos wrote: "There were Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Con- stantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn .... Steel, glass, tile, con- crete will be the material of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwin-

dowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on

3 Wirz and Striner, Washington Deco, p. 21; Richard Striner, "Echo Deco," Museum and Arts Washington 3, no. 2 (March/April 1987): 17-19.

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Art Deco 23

Fig. 3. G. Val Myer, Broadcasting House, BBC Studio, Portland Place, London, 1932. From Architectural Review 72, no. 429 (August 1932): 46.

pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunder- storm." Contemporaneously, novelist and critic Rebecca West observed that on New York's "Lex-

ington Avenue there is a vast apartment house which rears its dark masses like the Pyramids and which like them is an example of mystery-making in stone." For other social critics, design seemed to promise an actual release from historical cycles- critic Edwin Avery Park ventured in 1930 that the skyscraper is "an eternal principle-nothing of the moment."4

Past and future, ageless archetypes, and ancient mysterymaking were reawakened in thrilling new materials: how tellingly art deco designers looked to both extremes of the historical continuum-the

ancient past and the distant future, the pharaohs' world and the world of Buck Rogers-and fused the images. Representations of strange gods in futuristic settings, as in Fritz Lang's 1926 film classic Metropolis, pervaded art deco designs. And the tendency continued, albeit in muted form, throughout the 1930os. One can see it in the myriad public buildings that synthesized classical composi- tion and streamlined curves that bespoke the world of tomorrow (figs. 3, 4). It can also be seen in

4 John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925; reprint, Bos- ton: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963), p. 12; Rebecca West quoted in Herbert Croly, "A New Dimension in Architectural Effects," Architectural Record 57, no. 1 (January 1925): 93; Edwin Avery Park, "The New Expression in the Arts," Architectural Forum 52, no. 2 (February 1930): 35-

Fig. 4. Robert Stanton, King City High School Auditorium, King City, Calif., 1937. (Courtesy, American Institute of Architects Archives.)

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24 Winterthur Portfolio

Fig. 5. Dining room, T. Eaton and Co., Montreal, ca. 1930, Jacques Carlu, designer, Natacha Carlu, muralist. From Architectural Record 69, no. 6 (June 1931): 448.

Joyce's masterwork Finnegans Wake, with its dream- like blending of historical cycles (adapted from the writings of Giambattista Vico), Jungian archetypes, and mythological presences-a work begun in the mid 1920os and slowly, incrementally polished in the 193os-as well as in the 1938 vision of William Butler Yeats, who argued, "all things fall and are built again" amid the strange historical spiral.5 The impulse to synthesize, to bridge antago-

nistic realms-past and future, conservative and radical-was a defining quality of art deco and its role in the world of design. It explains the ten- dency of art deco to reconcile classical composition and even some aspects of classical language with salutes to the radical modernist idiom. By the 1930s, the synthesizing tendency produced a wealth of buildings and objects in which classical composition, modernist simplification of form, streamlining, and Parisian-inspired ornamentation were combined (fig. 5).

But reconciliation, while frequently a perilous business in design, was especially risky in this age of angst. Time and again, middle-range design was subjected to merciless attacks. It was art deco's distinct misfortune to be scorned as the very em- bodiment of kitsch for precisely its highest achievements.

In 1928 noted commentator Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., broadly sketched the character and interaction of what he regarded as the key design tendencies of the times. They were essentially past- related, future-related, and mediational. In the first group were "Traditionalists"--those whose "controlling idea" demanded the "adaptation of the various architectural manners of the past to the needs of the moment." At the other pole were the "New Pioneers"-the radical modernists seeking "purity" and "austere beauty" through "ascetic avoidance of ornament." Finally, there were the "New Traditionalists"-those who were "retro-

spective in their tendency to borrow freely from the past" yet "modern in that they feel free to use and combine ... the elements thus borrowed [with] new materials developed by science, controlling them so that they shall not shock the eye." Among the new traditionalists, Hitchcock included Wright, the Wiener Werkstitte, and the works of French designers that were exhibited "at the Exposition of 1925." Although Hitchcock believed that the new traditionalists represented "an intelligently taken position," he also stated that traditionalism, whether old or new, was "already wearing itself out." He acknowledged, "the manner of the New Pioneers may not be that which is destined to supersede the New Tradition," but could not suppress the opinion, "no other young architec- tural movement has developed so brilliantly" as the movement of the new pioneers: "they represent a far more living architecture than that of the New Traditionalists."' Thus was the gauntlet hurled in 1928-respectfully but unmistakably. The move- ment (or movements) relating to art deco came under attack very quickly by the partisans of what was soon to be called the "International Style."

It is commonplace now to take the diversity of modern design for granted. Students have long looked upon Bauhaus/international style design as merely an influential movement among a range of divergent modernisms. We smile at the notion that

5 William Butler Yeats, "Lapis Lazuli" (1938), in Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (1962; reprint, New York: P. F. Collier, 1966), p. 16o.

6 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., "Modern Architecture," pt. 1, "The Traditionalists and the New Tradition," and pt. 2, "The New Pioneers," Architectural Record 63, no. 4 (April 1928): 337- 49 passim, and no. 5 (May 1928): 453-57 passim.

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Art Deco 25

the sleek glass boxes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were somehow a purer representation of moder- nity than the products of other very different mod- ernist movements, such as expressionism or (in the fine arts) surrealism. Yet the intellectual hegemony, if not intellec- tual tyranny, achieved by the purist international style was, in Gebhard's words, "one of the most impressive sales pitches of our century."'7 The creed of radical "functionalism" and its antihistori-

cist applications led to a swaggering divisiveness. The modernist crusade became so strident that

even the polemics of Le Corbusier, who had ini- tially argued for a modern design that would achieve a twentieth-century reformulation of clas- sicism, had yielded by the 1930s to a widely held conviction that classicism and modernism were

fundamentally at odds. The rhetoric of Le Corbusier conveys the spirit

militant. In his famous 1923 manifesto, Towards a New Architecture (Vers Une Architecture), the princi- ples rang out: "There is a moral sentiment in the feeling for mechanics. The man who is intelligent, cold and calm has grown wings to himself." Intel- lectuals were obligated either to acknowledge this and join in or to lose the chance of averting social cataclysm: "Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may achieve or may not. Every- thing lies in that: everything depends upon the effort made and the attention paid to these alarm- ing symptoms. Architecture or Revolution. Revo- lution can be avoided." The way to avoid revolu- tion was to create "the mass production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass production houses. The spirit of living in mass production houses."8

By 1929 Le Corbusier was even more impa- tient: "This century has officially opened to us gates yawning on the infinite, on majesty, silence and mystery. . . . Never was there an epoch so powerfully, so unanimously inspired. Poetry is everywhere, constant, immanent." And yet, in- credibly, "the past has ensnared us. ... We are cowardly and timorous, lazy and without imagina- tion .... It is my opinion that as yet we have seen nothing new, done nothing new."'9

There was no mistaking the apocalyptic tone of

the manifestos, even with the caveat "Revolution can be avoided." The devastation and irrationality of World War I had left a searing impression on the minds of certain writers and artists that West-

ern culture had only one more chance to avert a dark age. The sense of mission infusing so many of the modernist movements-explicitly linked in many cases to millennial creeds of both the left and the right wings-took on a new urgency in the aftermath of the war. In 1931 Fritz Schumacher proclaimed, "the war shattered all continuity af- forded by feeling." A consequence of this was that architects were under "pressure to express [their] time completely. . . . Out of the darkness grows slowly the rose hour of dawn."10

Many commentators in the world of design took up the cause, and their cries became increas- ingly militant. In 1934 social and literary critic Herbert Read averred: "An artist must plan the distribution of cities within a region; an artist must plan the distribution of buildings within a city; an artist must plan the houses themselves, the halls and factories and all that makes up the city; an artist must plan the interiors of such buildings- the shapes of the rooms and their lighting and color; an artist must plan the furniture of the rooms, down to the smallest detail, the knives and forks, the cups and saucers and the door han- dles."" While all of this had no doubt been said before, Read's tone carried with it a new and terr- ible intensity. Everything depended on the effort made and the attention paid to the alarming symp- toms-as Le Corbusier had said.

The polemics prompted a reformulation of the rationalist primitivism that had informed certain byways of eighteenth-century thought, especially the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau-a sense that rationality lies in stripping from the hu- man condition all accretions of artifice that

suppress the underlying instinctive sense of truth. The twentieth-century reduction of artifice into truth in form was intended as much as a work of

social engineering as of liberation. No longer would wild, irrational, and destructive passions lay to waste the achievements of Western man, if the environment were stripped of lies to reveal the dignity of human needs-goods and services,

7 Gebhard, "Moderne in the U.S.," p. 5. 8 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick

Etchells (London: Architectural Press, 1948), pp. 119, 268-69, 12.

9 Le Corbusier, "Architecture, the Expression of the Mate- rials and Methods of Our Times," Architectural Record 66, no. 2 (August 1929): 126, 128.

10 Fritz Schumacher, "Trends in Architectural Thought," Architectural Forum 54, no. 4 (April 1931): 402.

11 Herbert Read, Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial

Design (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 40.

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26 Winterthur Portfolio

straightforwardly delivered through honest form and function.

The intellectual hegemony of the new vision in the world of 193os and 1940s architecture is famil- iar enough, but less familiar is the pervasiveness of the vision among a wider literary and cultural realm. Two examples display the extent to which the vision had affected social criticism by the late 1920s. Economist Stuart Chase, in a lengthy at- tempt to assess the impact of machine-made ways of life on society, pronounced, "the most impres- sive exhibit in the rebirth of art" is "the skyscraper, a pure machine creation." When that form of ar- chitecture is "treated for what it is, rather than as a Greek temple or a Moorish palace, ... we have an authentic work of art." Social critic Waldo Frank was more vehement. He condemned the "architec- tural lies that our ambitious architects smear over

our steel structures" and the fragments of anti- quated styles that are "pilfered and stuck about our buildings."12 To men such as these the moral was very clear: modern design should be honest enough to make a clean break with the past, to design boldly for a new century, to take command of the unruly machine age and effectively har- ness it.

The new creed did not go unchallenged by ar- chitects trained in the Ecole des Beaux Arts tra-

dition or by sympathetic and genteel critics. The responses were often impassioned. The radical creed, traditionalists protested, was a false pre- scription for the ills of Western culture-the very last thing that society needed in an age fraught with chaos, threatened by disintegration, and marked by a center that could not hold. What was really needed was a shoring up of the Western tradition, an affirmation of its continuities. In 1927 Milton B. Medary, president of the American In- stitute of Architects, publicly condemned the pre- cepts of radical modernism as "sophistry" and pro- claimed that one might as well go beyond architecture and reduce all civilization to the ab-

surd and the unintelligible: "Let us have an en- tirely new written language, as well as the physical one; let us stop using the words used by Shake- speare and express our thoughts by sounds never heard before." In 1930 at an institute convention, avowed traditionalist C. Howard Walker returned

the fire of modernist George Howe-who had con- demned the "overwhelming majority" of tradi-

tionalist buildings as "ramshackle, sentimental, pretentious, dishonest, and ugly"-with his own declamation: "It has been reserved for the so-

called Modernists to be irritated at any resem- blance to anything that has calm, and to adore ex- cess in every direction, to be shapeless, crude, eliminated in detail to nothingness, explosive in detail to chaos and to create sensation with the

slapstick and the bludgeon."13 Yet in their writings architectural conservatives

were often quick to acknowledge that traditions might still require revitalization and possibly some- thing even greater-as in the mythic parable of Leda and the Swan, a new infusion of spirit-if the twentieth century's challenges were to be met. In 1930 an editorial in the influential Federal Architect condemned the "germ of Modern Architecture" with its "thumb-nosing at the past" but admitted, "modern architecture can be good" so long as it entails a simultaneous "breaking away from the old architecture" and "a loyalty" to the more worth- while aspects of tradition, an achievement the edi- torial writer formulated as "the Moderne tradi-

tionalized, the Traditional modernized." Three years later, classicist Paul Philippe Cret lashed out at the "left wing of the modernists, which ... pro- fesses to be strictly truthful," while inflicting "twice as much glass surface in a room as is usable." He decried the "holier-than-thou" hypocrisy and in- sisted on the right to do what he believed to be "appropriate even if somebody else did it before." Yet as he took this position, he was also reaping praise for synthesizing classicism and modern simplification of form in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. (1929-32). For Cret the "modernist trend" was "useful," when purged of its dogmas and affectations; he pointedly saluted the modernist movement in the buildings he designed for Chicago's Century of Progress Ex- position in 1933-14

Although some influential classicists desired a conditional rapprochement with the modernists, the continued vilifications by modernist writers en- sured an escalating feud. By the late 1930s the polemical bloodletting in the controversies sur-

12 Stuart Chase, Men and Machines (New York: Macmillan, 1930), pp. 242, 245-46; Waldo Frank, The Re-Discovery of America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), pp. 90-91.

'" Milton B. Medary, "President Medary's Address, the 1927 Convention, American Institute of Architects," Architec- tural Forum 46, no. 6 (June 1927): [2]; Howe and Walker quoted in "Modernist and Traditionalist," Architectural Forum 53, no. 1 (July 1930): 49, 50.

14 "Can Modern Architecture Be Good," Federal Architect 1, no. 2 (October 1930): 6, 8, 9; Paul Philippe Cret, "Ten Years of Modernism," Architectural Forum 59, no. 2 (August 1933): 92, 94-

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Art Deco 27

rounding the plans for the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art are notable exam- ples of the level of hostility.

The search for a reconciliation in the modern-

ist-traditionalist war was an abiding theme with certain architectural commentators in the 1920S and 1930s. It took on more urgency when the full- blown manifestations of totalitarianism were ascen-

dant by the mid 1930s and as intolerance of the radical modernists was more than fully repaid in the Nazi-led purge of Weimar cultural "degener- acy" and the Stalinist suppression of the avant- garde. As the forces of intolerance became more powerful, prospects for pacification appeared more dubious. Even some of the more striking ar- chitectural compromises, such as modernized ver- sions of classicism, were easily put to use by repres- sive regimes. There could be no comfort to the democratic adherents of classicism-particularly Americans who regarded the buildings designed by John Russell Pope and his colleagues as temples of democracy-to behold the structures designed by Albert Speer for Hitler's Germany. Somewhere, between the Museum of Modern Art and what the

Nazis exhibited as examples of "degenerate art," there had to exist a middle path of humane con- temporaneity. But modernized classicism proved an undependable compromise, and radical mod- ernists continued to deny that there was any legiti- mate basis for compromise in design.

In 1930 Wright-although known for his own frequent intolerance-delivered a powerful ap- peal in which he argued that neither the "senti- mentality of the 'ornamental"' nor the newer "sterility of ornaphobia" could satisfy the needs of modern society: "I believe that Romance-this quality of the heart, the essential joy that we have in living-by human imagination of the right sort can be brought to life again .... Our architecture ... [will] become a poor, flat-faced thing of steel bones, box-outlines, gas-pipe and hand-rail fittings . . without this essential heart beating in it. Ar- chitecture, without it, could inspire nothing."'5

Three years later architectural critic Talbot Hamlin joined the fray. "It is not quantitative func- tionalism that is at the root of great architecture. It is not abstruse intellectual content of any kind ... It is not conformity to any theory.... It is never a denial of joy in life .... To be beautiful, gracious, enticing-to take the bare limbs of building and

make them flower like cherry trees in spring-is this not the engendering power of great architec- ture? ... The root of great architecture is like the root of any created beauty, deep in the matrix of human consciousness. It is spontaneity, delight in form. ... Can it be that the International Style has never learned how to play?"16

Against these polemics, art deco, a quintessen- tially playful design movement, was assessed in the twenties and thirties. Initial reactions to the de-

signs varied widely. In 1925 art critic Helen Apple- ton Read reviewed the displays at the Paris exposi- tion and pronounced that both the "credo of modern art" and "the glorification of the machine" had been "determining factors in the development of this new decor." Other critics reached precisely the opposite conclusion and attacked the designs for failing to live up to the potential of machine aesthetics. Sheldon Cheney derisively observed that Paris had "spread out the buildings of the Ex- position of Decorative Arts, avowedly to bring to focus contemporary French effort outside of the traditional styles-and to bring world Modernism into agreement with the graceful French talent. But that affair, and the sporadic outcroppings here and there, . . . have only gone to show that outside a few inspired engineers and one or two imported radical architects, the impotent Beaux Arts men still control France."17

It was perfectly true that beaux arts training could be found in the backgrounds of numerous middle-range designers; in the United States, also, a significant number of architects widely regarded as "modernistic," in the sense of being sympathetic to modernism while refusing to disavow orna- ment-architects such as William Van Alen and

Raymond Hood, respectively the designers of the Chrysler Building and (with several collaborators) Rockefeller Center-had been trained according to the principles of the ecole. It was also true that classicism pervaded much of the 1925 Paris exposi- tion, notwithstanding the exotic ornamental lan- guage. But these middle-range designers were seeking to expand their work to come to terms with modernity and the machine. It was this act of pre- sumption-this intrusion on the preserve of high- art purism-that infuriated the radicals. Only a

15 Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture, Being the Kahn Lectures for 193o (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931), PP- 40, 39.

16 Talbot Faulkner Hamlin, "The International Style Lacks the Essence of Great Architecture," American Architect 143, no. 2615 (January 1933): 12.

17 Helen Appleton Read, "The Exposition in Paris," Inter- national Studio 82, no. 342 (November 1925): 93; Sheldon Cheney, The New World Architecture (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930), pp. 29, 175-

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28 Winterthur Portfolio

machine-age aesthetic that was integral in form and content could ever be worthy, the radicals in- sisted; mere "expressiveness" was contemptible. As Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Philip Johnson pointedly explained in 1934, the problem encountered in in- troducing Americans to modern design was not "the conflict against a strong handicraft tradition but rather against a 'modernistic' French machine- age aesthetic."'18 Six years earlier Hitchcock had lamented, "the

vast mass of attendant 'modern' crafts which since

the 1925 Exposition has flowed into America" was, alas, "not very good." To him, "the danger . . . [was] that America will copy this special and not very desirable form of the New Traditionalism, forgetting that in Frank Lloyd Wright we already possess a far greater architect than even Perret."'1

Indeed, the alarm against Parisian art deco had been sounded in America almost immediately. In 1926 Ellow H. Hostache had subjected the exposi- tion to withering scorn:

October is waning-and so is this Exposition. This Expo- sition! What of it? ... A few million cubic feet of con-

crete and plaster, shedding their varnishes and now ready for the masse of the demolisher. . . . And what of the Decorative Arts? Les Arts Decoratifs are no more!... This bastard offspring of anaemic artisanship and efficient salesmanship was not fit to live. .. . But what was it all about? About ornament! The dictatorship of orna- ment! ... The modern world is in full formation, and drags with it too many elements of the past lacking any further reason for remaining. ... The entire Exposition might be described as a futile gesture,-if not a hope- lessly lost opportunity for helpful accomplishment.20

Other critics were more ambivalent. W. Franck-

lyn Paris pointed out that while the exposition fea- tured "many pieces and many effects which are a joy to the eye, and give promise to the flowering of a new style," there were also "startling new con- structions . . . all corners and sharp angles . . . where the designers manifest a laborious striving for riotous incoherency." What was one to make of it all? "It cannot be that this art is meant to en-

dure," Paris concluded: "these are all adventitious creations, a peculiarly fascinating combination of good and bad qualities, called into service by apos- tles of the superlative." Sculptor and critic Leon V.

Solon criticized the show for failing "to impart the conviction that it is an authoritative and convincing statement of an exalted aesthetic aim." He main- tained that the times demanded an authentic

"style," which he viewed as analogous to biological development. (The language of Darwinism, in a highly popularized form-so often a medium for expressing concerns about the "evolution" of his- tory-pervaded this architectural review, as did the pseudoscientific theories of race identity that gave to this period so much of its sinister quality.) "In the phases of the [prevailing] Modernist move- ment . . . the French operate under a tempera- mental disadvantage ... [because] the characteris- tics of the style," by which he meant modernism, "and the actuating impulses are fundamentally Nordic."2' No doubt the Nazis, who loathed the modernist avant-garde, took this as a backhanded compliment.

Despite his initially negative reaction, three years later Solon was willing to credit an example of art deco architecture-specifically New York's Park Avenue Building (1927, Buchman and Kahn), with qualities befitting a coherent "stylistic species": "We are living in a period in which the origination of a new order of aesthetic expression is under way; not as a passing vogue . . . but as a general movement compelling the direction of progressive activities." For Solon this portended "a radical alteration in the angle from which aesthetic problems will be approached in the future-more in accord with contemporary scientific investiga- tion than that order of procedure which, in the past, attended stylistic evolution." And Ely Jacques Kahn's "richness of invention" and "pure logic of all argument responsible for each phase of expres- sion" in the building were "so self-evident and con- vincing," that Solon chose not to "insult the read- er's perception by describing the obvious."22

"Pure logic" was exactly what most hostile crit- ics believed was absent from art deco design; and by the early 1930S such critics were increasingly vocal. For the most part, their denunciations pro- ceeded from the premises of radical modernism and became snider as the years passed.

is Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Philip Johnson, Introduction to Machine Art: March 6-April 20, 1934 (1934; reprint, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969), p. [9].

19 Hitchcock, "Modern Architecture," pp. 346, 347- 2o Ellow H. Hostache, "Reflections on the Exposition des

Arts Decoratifs," Architectural Forum 44, no. 1 (January 1926): 11, 15.

21 W. Francklyn Paris, "The International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Art in Paris," pt. 1, "Interior Architecture," and pt. 2, "General Features," Architectural Rec- ord 58, no. 3 (September 1925): 265, and no. 4 (October 1925): 376, 384; Leon V. Solon, "Will the Exposition Regain Artistic Leadership for France?" Architectural Record 58, no. 4 (October 1925): 391, 392.

22 Leon V. Solon, "The Park Avenue Building, New York City, Buchman and Kahn, Architects: The Evolution of a Style," Architectural Record 63, no. 4 (April 1928): 289, 296-97.

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Art Deco 29

In a 1932 issue of Architectural Review designer Serge Chermayeff offered an invidious compari- son of two new office buildings commissioned by London daily newspapers. The Daily Telegraph building "flaunts innumerable petticoats nicely edged with familiar Parisian lace--British-made copies of Paris models, 1925 Exposition," a venture thoroughly "mannered and unprofitable." By con- trast, the Daily Express building "is quietly elegant in a tight-fitting black dress made of good cut which tells with frankness and without prudery the well-made figure wearing it." In the same issue, the magazine featured a poem by Michael Dugdale, a young designer with the British Tecton group, satirizing ornament applied to industrial buildings:

Leave no space undecorated; Hide those ugly wheels and pipes. Cover them with noughts and crosses, Mess them up with stars and stripes.

Now for curves and now for colour, Swags and friezes, urns and jars.

Now for little bits of faience, Now for giddy glazing bars.

Whoops! Tra-la! let's all go crazy, Tirra-lirra! let's go gay. Sanity may come tomorrow, Ornament is in today.

What the country wants is beauty, Art's the thing for industry. Who'd suppose such curves and zig-zags Could conceal a factory?

A few months earlier, Dugdale's poetic mischief-- this time in the Augustan tones of Alexander Pope-had ridiculed the British designers of furnishings:

Hence, Inhumanity, austere of Line, In Execution harsh, and in Design. Be Chic, be Up-to-date, but still preserve The softening Flute, the mitigating Curve. Be Human, Intimate, and even Funny, New, but Polite, for Manners Maketh Money.... Let Germans storm. Who cares for what they say? We can be Functional as well as they. We know our Modern stuff. We, too, can feel The charm of Oil-cloth or of Stainless Steel.

How plain our Furniture; no Mouldings there. It's not too Intricate, nor yet too bare. Thus we outstrip the Germans and the Dutch Severe as they, but with the Human Touch. Lo! Rectilinear the Cupboard climbs (Always politely moving with the Times).

Step upon step ascending to its Climax, Within its sheath of Aluminum Plymax. So too the Lights, that skilfully combine The rival claims of Function and Design, Before thy Shrine, Uncertainty, are lit, To shed their Radiance o'er us as we sit

Discreetly on the Architectural Fence, Too hard for Sentiment, too soft for Sense.23

Such were the vulnerabilities of a design char- acterized by playfulness and compromise. Al- though art deco in its Parisian mode was a popular tour de force and diffused with astonishing speed around the world, on the critical and intellectual plane, as commentator Cervin Robinson has said, "Art Deco and its journalism were a pushover for the International Style critics with their verbal at- tack and defense, their sloganeering, and their em-

phasis on simplification rather than ambiguity.'"24 Dugdale and like-minded critics made ambiguity in design look ridiculous at best and like mincing cowardice at worst.

To be sure, many important designers who worked in the mode of art deco were articulate in

self-defense. Architect Ralph T. Walker argued that designers had "come to a bend in the road, a place in which to pause, where we can look back- ward over the past and see its contributions and at the same time look forward over the future and

glimpse its possibilities." Thoughtful designers had to realize that "while the desire to be economical in

structure is laudable, it is not by any means the end of the story. . . . The fundamental, spiritual, and intellectual needs of man can never be satisfied

with the thin, austere design of the engineer- architect." Muralist and sculptress Hildreth Meiere rebuked the "Left Wing Modernists," declaring, "human nature demands interest and relief from

barrenness by some sort of enrichment." Among the middle-range architects and firms whose work she praised were the Voorhees, Gmelin, and Wal- ker firm, Kahn, the designers of Rockefeller Cen- ter, and, above all, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, "the only man to be claimed by both sides of the great Traditional vs. Modern argument." Ar- chitectural journals repeatedly hailed Parisian-

23 Serge Chermayeff, "The New Building for the Daily Ex- press," Architectural Review 72, no. 428 (July 1932): 3-14, pl. 11 caption, additional inserted unnumbered pages; Michael Dug- dale, "Ornamentia Praecox," Architectural Review 72, no. 428 (July 1932): 4o; Michael Dugdale, "Safety First," Architectural Review 71, no. 424 (March 1932): 122.

24 Cervin Robinson, "Buildings and Architects," in Cervin Robinson and Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Skyscraper Style: Art Deco New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 28.

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30 Winterthur Portfolio

style art deco ornamentation for its mediational qualities. In February 1928, for example, the editors of Architectural Forum provided close-up views of floral ornamentation (in the mode of Ed- gar Brandt, a key designer whose work was fea- tured at the 1925 exposition) adorning a modest art deco commercial building at 420 Madison Av- enue in New York: the "architects have struck a

new note in this example of conservative modern decoration."25

One of the last and most articulate pleas for cessation of the radical-traditionalist war came

from Charles R. Richards, director of New York's Museum of Science and Applied Art, who con- demned the "two sets of ideas that divide the ar-

chitects, viz., dependence upon tradition as the sole source of inspiration and the conviction that design should be thoroughly adapted to modern requirements. ... In each camp one or the other of these ideas is held with such tenacity and intoler- ance of the other that real progress is severely handicapped." Richards argued for a "rapproche- ment": "We need to relinquish our extreme at- titudes and bring the two opposing camps nearer together."26

Countless middle-range designers strove to achieve such a rapprochement in the 1930s; "mod- ernized" or "stripped" classicism was frequently the preferred approach (fig. 6). Some designers strove to achieve a thorough interpenetration of classical and modern principles (figs. 7, 8). Signifi- cantly, in both architecture and design they often used the language of the 1925 Paris exposition to lend dynamism to their fusion of classical princi- ples and modern simplification of form (fig. 9).

By the end of the decade, hostility among the modernist critics toward Parisian-style art deco had heightened. In 1938 Hamlin offered a lukewarm, and half-apologetic defense, acknowledging that in addition to the new and creative flexibilities emerg- ing in the modernized classicism that he admired, there had been a "sudden waking up to the pos- sibilities of independent and creative design . . . [following] the Paris Exposition of 1925.... Dislike as we may the overwrought eccentricities of much of the work at that show, it is, I think, indisputable that, without the flood of 'modernism' which fol-

lowed that exposition ... [the current] readiness to consider and adopt new forms (slight as that may be) would have been impossible."27

The streamlined mode of art deco in the 1930s fared somewhat better, at least with a few critics. Cheney, who had nothing but scorn for the 1925 Paris exposition, zealously embraced the aesthetic of streamlining. In 1936 Cheney and his wife, Martha, hailed streamlining as a "valid symbol of the contemporary life flow . .. when it emerges as form expressiveness." Although the Cheneys ac- knowledged that the symbols of streamlining were sometimes abused by "superficial stylists eager to ... make them a fad of the moment," nonethe- less there comes a moment when "logical design passes into the essentially unanalyzable region of pure form creation . .. felt by the artist to be in harmony with some larger rhythm and order of the universe." The Cheneys developed this metaphysical theme with explicitly religious analogies: "When we see a functionally-formed useful product, smoothly encased in some bright machine-age material, corners rounded off, pro- jections sheared away . . . the machine-conscious mind begins to relate all such products of scientist- artist design back to the most conspicuous symbol and inspiration of the age, as the reverent medieval mind related everything to the symbol of the cross."28 Cultural historians have frequently commented on the popularity of streamlining in depression America and concluded that the re- lated themes of cohesion, unity, and smooth coor- dination were inspiring in a culture seeking to transform disaster and trauma into an opportunity for twentieth-century pioneering and community rededication. Industrial designers themselves were often among the boldest and most flamboyant pub- licists of streamlining; Raymond Loewy became a celebrity on this basis.

But the priests of radical and high-art modern- ism remained intransigent in their opposition, even though the streamline practitioners bore the credentials of industrial designers and had thereby apparently achieved the rapprochement between art and industry that Werkbund and Bauhaus the- orists had sought for years. Johnson disdainfully remarked, "principles such as 'streamlining' often

25 Ralph T. Walker, "A New Architecture," Architectural Forum 48, no. 1 (January 1928): 1; Hildreth Meiere, "The Question of Decoration," Architectural Forum 57, no. 1 (July 1932): 1, 2; "Editor's Note," Architectural Forum 48, no. 2 (Feb- ruary 1928): 156 caption (emphasis added).

26 Charles R. Richards, "A Present-Day Outlook on Ap- plied Art," Architectural Record 77, no. 4 (April 1935): 228, 230.

27 Talbot Faulkner Hamlin, "A Contemporary American Style: Some Notes on Its Qualities and Dangers," Pencil Points 19, no. 2 (February 1938): loo100.

28 Sheldon Cheney and Martha Cheney, Art and the Ma- chine: An Account of Industrial Design in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Whittlesey House/McGraw-Hill, 1936), pp. 98, 294, 102.

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Art Deco 31

Fig. 6. Francis Keally, State Capitol, Salem, Oreg., 1936-38. (Courtesy, Oregon State Archives.)

Fig. 7. Gazelle bowl, Steuben Glass, Sidney Waugh, de- signer, 1935. Glass; H. 63/4", diam. 61/2". (Metropolitan Museum of Art: Photo, courtesy, Steuben.)

Fig. 8. Paul Manship, Diana, 1925. Bronze; H. 647/8", W. 411/2", D. 18". (Courtesy, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Paul Manship.)

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32 Winterthur Portfolio

Fig. 9. Fellheimer and Wagner, Cincinnati Union Terminal, Cincinnati, 1929-33. From Architectural Forum 58, no. 6 (June 1933): 444-

receive homage out of all proportion to their applicability." John McAndrew, who succeeded Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art's depart- ment of architecture and industrial art, offered specific case studies in absurdity, pointing out, for example, "streamlined paper cups, if dropped, would fall with less wind-resistance," but were no better "than the old ones for the purpose for which they were actually intended, namely drinking."29 Loewy's streamlined, chromium-plated pencil sharpener was a favorite target for ridicule because its look-of-speed design seemed utterly fatuous to the purists. In contrast to "styling"-which the radicals considered no better than pandering to middlebrow vulgarity-the Museum of Modern Art offered a "machine art" exhibition in 1934 that was limited to industrial parts-springs, propel- lers, and the like, presumably the stuff of authentic and proletarian virtue.

Impious detractors (such as Cret) had already

complained that the reverence toward machine materials had nothing necessarily to do with func- tional achievement-the actual delivery of ser- vices. Two French architects, Michel Roux-Spitz and Jean Porcher, made the point forcefully in 1929. Rejecting the functionalist slogans of Le Cor- busier as "absolute tyranny," they attacked the ar- bitrariness of design practices that masqueraded as pure logic:

Le Corbusier's architecture belongs to a system. As in the case of the architecture of tradition, it leads to the pursuit of arbitrary form and a formula. It is the con- trary of, and no more realist than, academicism. Whether he wishes to or not, he is impelled to design facades or ornaments to correspond with his ideal of "modern" form. . . . Instead of curves, he may have straight lines; in place of masses more or less elegantly rounded-cubes; he may multiply unnecessarily the an- gles, corner windows, details not plumb, and substitute wherever possible the vertical for the horizontal. And these new forms he will name "modern."30

29 Johnson, Machine Art, p. [io]; John McAndrew, "'Mod- ernistic' and 'Streamlined,' " Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 5 (December 1938): 2.

30 Michel Roux-Spitz and Jean Porcher, "Tendencies of the School of Modern French Architecture," Architectural Record 65, no. 4 (April 1929): 336-37-

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Art Deco 33

Much later the writings of commentators such as Reyner Banham led to the widespread revision of views that made the international style appear to be "as much a mode of packaging" of machine aes- thetics as was streamline styling. The historical comeuppance of the international style is illus- trated by Richard Guy Wilson's recent wry obser- vation that while "the machine purists proclaimed the principles of simplicity, function, and clean- liness," surely "some of them" must have noticed that machines were frequently "complex, imper- fect, and messy."31 The intellectual prestige of the international style increased after World War II. And the poisonous ill feelings engendered by the war be- tween the radical modernists and the traditionalists

cast many forms of middle-range contemporaneity into outer darkness. Gebhard maintains, "the in- tensity of the struggle between the High Art Mod- ernists and the Traditionalists came close to being a religious war." And although "the popularizers of Modernism in the 2os and 3os avoided much of this spiteful and vicious battle," the war continued to rage. What mattered to most protagonists and antagonists alike was whether design had a cogent philosophy, meaning a strident or militant philoso- phy. All else was slovenliness. Satirist and com- mentator Osbert Lancaster reflected the views of

many in the late 1950s as he looked dyspeptically back on the "bogus Hollywood modernism," that "nightmare amalgam of a variety of elements derived from several sources." Its users, he com- plained, had completely misunderstood "the Cor- busier-Gropius school of architects." These "bars of beaten copper," he intoned, "these sheets of black glass, these friezes of chromium pomegra- nates not only did not arise out of the demands of construction but had not the slightest shred of tradition to provide a threadbare excuse for their revolting existence."32 Neither orthodox in its modernism nor stalwart in its traditionalism, art deco was relegated to no-man's-land-that is, until the revival of the 1960s and 1970s.

Much of the revival sprang from the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, the "liberating" search for alternative ways of perception, especially if this involved sid- ing with the underdog. "With the advent of 'Pop'

and 'Op,' with our present fling into the commer- cial vernacular," said Gebhard in 1969, the world of art history was "in the mood to visually and in- tellectually respond" to popular modernism of the twenties and thirties: "we are now free to sample other stylistic containers" besides the international style. The explosion of interest in art deco in the seventies, however, was more than just a sampling of exotic fare; it was also the kind of cultural epiphany that drives almost any historical revival, the sudden remembrance of things past, the flood- ing back into consciousness of a lost period savor that evoked an age. The rediscovery of art deco provided the occasion for "word magic" and litanies-threnodic lists that sought to elicit the flavor of the interwar era. In a long assessment in the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable sang the wonders of "elegantly packaged Lelong per- fumes, extravagant Hollywood sets, the clair- voyant Futurama, the great public rooms of the great hotels, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, Hugh Ferriss's New York, publications in stylish Bernhard Gothic type, omnipresent glass brick and torcheres." Art deco was "the scent, the es- sence, the spirit of an art-historical moment."33

At the same time, historians of art and architec- ture moved beyond the defensive task of resurrect- ing art deco-after all, how could a movement that seemed to be emerging as the definitive signature of its age be illegitimate? The new academic parti- sans of art deco joined in a widespread rejection of the international style, in tune with the emergent postmodern sensibility. An opening salvo ap- peared between the lines of a 1975 interpretation of art deco architecture in New York-"Today, when we have had twenty years of the austere ar- chitecture ushered in by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Lever House, it may be refreshing to re- examine a style that aims to be popular, entertain- ing, and urbane." Authors Bletter and Robinson invited readers to "imagine architects producing buildings that are 'modern,' rich in meaning, and sensuous," and suggested that "the real weakness of Art Deco architects may have been their lack of training in ... verbal defense of design." Indeed, the art deco architect was "archetypically" a "con- vivial fellow" who "hadn't a chance" against the "hostility" of the international style. In yet another appraisal, architecture critic Paul Goldberger acknowledged that art deco was back in vogue "in

S' Gebhard, "Moderne in the U.S.," p. 5; Richard Guy Wil- son, "Machine Aesthetics," in Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, z9z8-194z (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), p. 53-

32 Gebhard, "About Style," p. 35; Osbert Lancaster, Here, Of All Places (1958), reprinted as A Cartoon History of Architecture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964), pp. 16o, 158.

33 Gebhard, "Moderne in the U.S.," pp. 18, 5; Ada Louise Huxtable, "The Skyscraper Style," New York Times Magazine, April 14, 1974, p. 58.

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34 Winterthur Portfolio

part because International Style modernism has it- self fallen somewhat out of favor."34

An inevitable part of the revival involved the analysis of art deco's identity, including the vexing task of defining boundaries. But for every study of the discrete stylistic influences and sources, includ- ing Parisian "zigzag" and industrial streamlining, and for all the remarks about the bitter polarities in interwar design, recent observers have hastened to stress the remarkably unifying tendencies of art deco. "It pervaded every visual aspect of ex- istence," said Huxtable in 1974, "from mon- umental architecture and the decorative arts

to clothes, jewelry, furniture, interiors, toasters and automobiles."35

Almost ten years later Wilson tried his hand at defining art deco. Admitting that "as a historian," he "would have preferred for Art Deco to remain a precise term referring to French-influenced de- sign," Wilson proclaimed himself to be "enough of a realist to recognize that the term has caught on." His embrace of the term, however, was far more than just an effort to make the best of the inevita- ble; there was, in his view, a very strong element of truth in the perception that the movement we call art deco represented an important unifying in- fluence. Consequently, "if we can use the term Art Deco not to designate a specific style, but rather in the sense that it is inclusive and connotes the tre-

mendous fertility of ideas, culture, and design, be- ginning in the early 2oth century and reaching a peak in the 192os and 1930s, we will better serve our purpose." It is possible "to see in the work of very conservative American architects such as Arthur Brown, Jr., or John Russell Pope certain touches, ornamental details, the treatment of a wall-that indicates they were the product of the 1920S and 1930s. It is equally possible to see in a very radical designer such as William Lescaze fea- tures that might be identified as Art Deco. And certainly Frank Lloyd Wright is part of it."36

As we continue to refine our understanding of the 1920S and 1930s, it is likely that the middle- range design will emerge more clearly than ever as a genial fulfillment of the challenge posed by Wright in 1930: the challenge to designers to create "romance" to mediate between the "senti-

mentality of the 'ornamental' and the sterility of

Fig. to. Allen and Lutzi, City Hall, Burbank, Calif., 1941. (Courtesy, American Institute of Architects Archives.)

ornaphobia." What Wright achieved as an idiosyn- cratic master was paralleled by a host of "convivial fellows" who, with exemplary flair, proceeded to make their ways through the intellectual scorched earth between the trenches of the conservatives

and radicals. The buildings of the twenties and thirties in which classicism, futuristic fantasy, streamlining, simplification of form, and Parisian- inspired ornamentation are fused are too numer- ous to be consistently the product of chance or individual foible (fig. to). There was something go- ing on between the poles of ideology, a vivid, con- tinuing, and pointedly self-evident demonstration of the belief that powerful design inspirations need not be inimical to one another. It would be a mis-

take to ascribe one all-pervasive outlook to mul- titudes of art deco designers. And yet, in an era of anxiety and hatred, a great many people were struggling to get their bearings, to escape from the influence of ruthless ideologies, to make their peace with the historical process, with all its chal- lenges and terrors-above all, to enjoy the contem- porary scene while it lasted, to "face the music and dance." If only as a form of whistling in the dark, the development of art deco in its historical setting is a poignantly human tale.

4 Robinson and Bletter, Skyscraper Style, p. 3; Rosemarie Haag Bletter and Cervin Robinson, "Skyscraper Style," Progres- sive Architecture (February 1975): 68, 73; Paul Goldberger, "Art

Deco," New York Times, January 31, 1974, p. 35- 35 Huxtable, "Skyscraper Style," p. 58. 36 Richard Guy Wilson, "Defining Art Deco," Art Deco News

3, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 2.

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