Art Déco era: between glamour, modernity and uncertainty.
- Margareth
- Aug 20
- 8 min read
Updated: Sep 26
On the centenary of the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes" in Paris, which marked the establishment of Art Deco style (a.k.a. Style 1925), Palazzo Reale in Milan has dedicated an exhibition to “Style 1925,” from Feb. 27 to June 29, 2025, with the title: "Art Deco. The Triumph of Modernity."
Its name comes from the contraction of the terms of the event that gave it notoriety: the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Held in Paris in 1925, the fair had the great merit of including, for the first time, the so-called applied arts (interior decoration and design), thus giving them artistic relevance and dignity.
A phenomenon of taste, Art Deco is a style that particularly concerned the decorative arts, visual arts, architecture and fashion and affected Europe between 1919 and 1930. Only in the United States did it have a more prolonged fortune, reaching until 1940.
From a historical point of view, the peculiarity of the Art Deco style is to situate itself precisely between the two world wars, coagulating in itself the optimistic dreams of the bourgeois modernity of the 1920s, after the Great War, dreams that, however, vanished very soon in the rubble of World War II.
A style hanging between two wars, vibrant with overwhelming joy, splendour and glamour, but also with unsettling uncertainty. Like the free dances of the great American dancer Isadora Duncan, not surprisingly considered the mother of modern dance, whose free movements inspired several works of art and applied art of the 1920s style.
Honoured by several artists, who reproduced her grace in bronze, glass, and ivory statuettes in the perfect Art Deco style, the famous American dancer is recounted through objects, now sought after and highly valued by collectors.
In Art Deco, the image of the woman undergoes a new phase, and the painting that serves as the poster for the Milan exhibition clearly expresses this (Alberto Martini, Wally Toscanini, 1925).
If in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both Symbolism and the Viennese Secession conveyed to us a woman on the one hand idealized and on the other mysterious, mad, demonic, sensual, a woman constricted and constrained in her seductive haughtiness (think of Gustav Klimt's Judith) the 1920s brought women back down to earth, recognizing them an emancipation sealed, in fashion, with the shortening of skirts and hair, without suffering or scandal.
In short, the women who supported the economy while the men were at the front came out of the conflict a little more independent and modern. And so they appear in the works on display: confident and strong-willed, yearning for modernity, posing before artists who portray them with renewed interest. In the Art Deco portraits, women are at the centre of the picture, looking the viewer in the face. They appear in all their strength of identity, which the artists acknowledge by representing them in contexts, in worlds, surrounded by objects that belong to them and help define them and not the other way around. Art Deco bears witness to a woman emancipating herself and experiencing, in the 1920s, a brief but intense silent revolution, at least of her image.
What is Art Deco?
In the spring of 1925, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes opened in Paris, paving the way for the style that came to be known as Art Deco. This new style embraced a specific language that was disseminated over about ten years, between the 1920s and 1930s, and represented modernity that was fast-paced, frenetic and influenced by avant-garde ideas. It involved the invention of splendid, fabulous settings for theatres, cinemas, cafés, hotels, trains, and cruise ships, and resulted in a renewal in the way people dressed and lived. It especially triumphed in the decorative arts.
The specific feature of Art Deco style was glamour, viewed as snobbish, imperious fashion characterised by a cold and ambivalent erotic vein. It meant absolute elegance, luxury, and the desire and joie de vivre of the modern age after the carnage of the Great War.
The exhibition describes the origins, developments, and triumphs of Italian Art Deco as compared with its French and Austrian-German counterparts, exploring several themes, until it came to an end, around the 1930s, when, due to changing political and economic conditions, Deco left Europe to reach the United States and spread across the rest of the world.
The origins
In the 1910s, the first people to sense the change in taste were artists who were influenced by the bright colours used by the Expressionists as well as by a sort of anti-naturalistic two-dimensionality. This can be visualised by comparing Young Russian Woman by Mario Cavaglieri (1913) with Marie-Rose Guérin Standing Before the Moulinet by Louis-Léon-Eugene Billotey (1914); it can be seen in the graphic arts of the Secessions, as well as in Vittorio Zecchin's embroidered tapestry and Galileo Chini's monumental preparatory study for the paintings of the staircase of the Terme Barzieri (spa) in Salsomaggiore (1919-1922). In the latter work, in particular, echoes of Gustav Klimt's oeuvre are scattered throughout the suptuous Deco style ornamentation.
1925: Exposition des Arted Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris
The exhibition that opened in Paris in 1925 was visited by sixty million people. It was the arrival point of various national expressions of a modern style, on the one hand, and the codification of the style, led by France, on the other. That modern style emblematically came to be known as Art Deco.
Germany had been defeated during WWI and was not invited to participate (but was present at the Monza Biennale held that same year). Nor did the United States due to the high costs. The event in Paris also had an international and political side, with the country consolidating its role as a judge of international taste and trade.
Italy chose to display only works of higher quality, and it was rewarded when the Grand Prix went to Gio Ponti and Galileo Chini for ceramics, Vittorio Zecchin for his transparent glassworks, Adolfo Wildt for sculpture, and Renato Brozzi for his silver works.
The French expression of Art Deco
The French position, which had always upheld the luxury object, reached a peak with the 1925 Expo. Meanwhile, exuberant and refined Art Deco succeeded in winning over the petty bourgeoisie and the public at large, but in a more impoverished version that finally made such works accessible.
Those years were characterised by a more decorative taste, such as the fabulous watercolour by Erté and Alberto Martini or the cabinetmaker Jules Leleu, who triumphed reinterpreting eighteenth-century forms.
Across the Atlantic, the United States was slower to embrace Art Deco, taking up the baton in the 1930s with its characteristic taste for the aerodynamic styling of Streamlining Modern, created mainly by designers Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, and Walter Dorwin Teague.
Fashion in the 1920s
By the time the First World War (1914-1918) had ended, many of the jobs that previously had been exclusively carried out by men were now being done by women.
This major turnaround led to the liberated woman of the 1920s. Women now wore bob haircuts, also known as à la garçonne, corsets had been abandoned, and clothes better suited to movement were being worn, with shorter skirts and more and more frequently sleeveless tops. The most widespread model was the straight tunic featuring a low waistline and the breastline was kept concealed.
Clothes like these had a simple sartorial line, which me- ant that bejewelled accessories and precious embroide- ries were often what marked the difference between an elegant outfit and a more ordinary one.
From the mid-1920s, clothing began to make use of the elasticity of fabric cut on a bias, resulting in a new wea- rability: thanks to asymmetrical cutting, but without forgoing the androgynous line, skirts became fuller and more flowing, and longer as well, while the waistline was becoming higher.
Love for Antiquity
The female image changes colour from the classical myth to the contemporary in Gio Ponti's most famous pieces created for Richard-Ginori, in which love of antiquity and joyful irony merge in language that is captivating, fascinating, and highly modern.
Ponti's cists, inspired by Etruscan age bronze containers, are decorated with a Classical Conversation, in which ancient ruins are seen through the romantic eyes of the Grand Tour, or with a Triumph of Love and Death, featuring Renaissance architecture, or, lastly, with the dreamlike and visionary Migration of the Sirens. All of these are allusions, never faithful replicas or specific citations: the figures, both ancient and contemporary, that populate such scenarios would seem to live in a silent and magical atmosphere inspired by the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico.
In the series My Women Gio Ponti offers ironic female nudes, unnaturally hanging from ropes, propped up against golden clouds, and emerging from corollas of fleshy flowers, their elongated shapes harkening back to Mannerist and Pre-Raphaelite painting, combined with the grace and simplification of the forms and volu- mes that are the offspring of the Secession.
Triumph and end of Art Déco
While Paris in 1925 put on a grand exhibition of the imaginary of a world that sought to free itself from the monotony of the everyday and identify beauty with luxury and elegance with lifestyle, the years that immediately followed led to its widespread success.
In 1927 Gio Ponti and Tomaso Buzzi completed their Centrepiece for the Embassies: a veritable remake of the "Venetian-style garden", in which the highly refined white porcelain with a gold finish morphed into tritons, seahorses, small animals, smiling cupids, miniature trees, and architectural elements with, at the very centre, the personification of Italy atop a shell emerging from a fantastic sea world.
Nevertheless, the fireworks, spurting fountains, alluring winks, feline footsteps, the most appealing and seductive expressions of feminine eternity, the ambiguity of the male figure - whether in the form of a dandy or a weary pilgrim - the mischievous Rococo, the Orient in the sitting room, the Charleston, the mechanical rhythm, the lightning-fast line, the untiring search for the pleasure of living, in other words, everything that Art Deco had been or had wanted to be, was quickly coming to the end of its creative path.
The 1930s and the monumental art of the Novecento Style
The early 1930s saw the definitive decline of Art Deco, which was soon replaced by the Novecento style not only in Italy but throughout Europe. The delicate grace of Art Deco was quickly replaced by a sense of monumentality, and graphic design and playful, delicate, even affected iconography gave way to a narrative urgency and new themes with a strong ideological imprint. But this is, in fact, another season, another story.
At the same time, the decorative arts underwent a profound transformation, abandoning the sumptuous and dry repertoire of Art Deco in its various forms.
Ceramic production was dominated by dry, tectonic forms, produced in moulds and without decoration, but coated with monochrome glazes, partly due to the autarchy imposed by the Fascist regime, which prevented the purchase of rare raw materials needed to produce a variety of glazes, as in the case of the austere red earthenware designed by Guido Andlovitz and Angelo Biancini for S.C.I. in Laveno and by Gio Ponti and Giovanni Gariboldi for Richard-Ginori.
In 1930, the Chrysler Building was inaugurated in New York, immediately followed by the Empire State Building and, in other US cities, by a myriad of skyscrapers, department stores, cinemas, theatres, villas and residences which, also with the employment of skilled Italian and French craftsmen, ushered in the American Art Deco era, which had by then definitively faded in Europe.
Source: "Art Deco, il trionfo della modernità" Palazzo Reale, from Feb. 27 to June 29, 2025.
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