Amid great anticipation, the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts – the first major event held in Paris since the Great War – opened on 28 April 1925, on a site between La Concorde and Les Invalides. Wanting to be among the great designers who were to meet there, Le Corbusier managed to raise a small building through which to present to the world the theses of his magazine, L’Esprit Nouveau, which later laid the foundations for a new architecture. However, the Swiss-French architect – like Konstantin Melnikov and Robert Mallet-Stevens, who too signed influential pavilions – saw that simple shapes, bare interiors, and standardized furniture pieces did not cause a stir among the public at large as did courtly halls, printed drapes, and fine chattels at the Hôtel du Collectionneur designed by Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann: a triumph of luxury and refinement that catapuled into the limelight a style then diffusedly known as Style moderne, but which we now call Art Déco because of its success during that fair.
The Art Déco aesthetic was not altogether new; its roots dug back to the Viennese Secession and pictorial avant-gardes, though its combination of geometric lines and well worked materials had the good fortune of flowering during a particular time of economic prosperity and lively hedonism, the Roaring Twenties. Neither was it a homogeneous movement, given that it spread all over the world wherever a skyscraper, a cinema, a car, or a radio was needed, becoming yet another expression of modernity, like jazz or the flappers. Today Art Déco turns a hundred, and at a moment in which minimalism is at loggerheads with the dominant exhibitionism: that’s why Elon Musk tweeted “I love Art Déco” and the ‘trend’ storms interior design magazines and Hollywood superproductions. Riding the tide, several museums have cooked up exhibitions this year, from monographic shows on specific figures – such as Tamara de Lempicka in Houston, and Paul Poiret or Ruhlmann in Paris – to thematic ones presenting the period from the angle of different disciplines, including at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Villa Empain in Brussels, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris starting October, sure to be the main course of this feast à la Great Gatsby.
