Proto–Art Deco / Style moderne (anticipatory)

This classification covers the formation of the decorative idiom that the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes would consolidate and that later criticism named Art Deco. The term was not available to its makers: contemporaries spoke of the style moderne, and "Art Deco" was coined retrospectively in the 1960s. The formative period runs from roughly 1908 to 1925 and draws on four converging sources — the geometric grid and checkerboard of the Wiener Werkstätte, the saturated non-naturalistic palette introduced to Paris by the Ballets Russes from 1909, the faceting and shallow spatial ambiguity of Cubism as domesticated by André Mare and the Maison Cubiste of 1912, and the decorative programme of Poiret's Atelier Martine. Its recurring vocabulary includes the stylised rose bouquet associated with Paul Iribe, garlands, baskets and fountains, the leaping gazelle and greyhound, chevron and zigzag, elongated and attenuated figures, and flat unmodelled colour held within a firm black contour. In printed ephemera the classification applies above all to the Gazette du Bon Ton and its circle, to luxury packaging, department store catalogues, theatre and ballet programmes, sheet music covers and early advertising design. The Record Institute applies it interpretively and, in one respect, uncomfortably: the label is inherently retrospective, since no designer working in 1913 understood themselves to be anticipating a style codified twelve years later. Assignment therefore requires that the artefact be independently dated before 1925 by documentary or physical evidence rather than by appearance, and that it display structural rather than incidental features of the emerging idiom. Material produced after 1925 is classified as Art Deco proper. The classification frequently coexists with the Directoire revival, the Wiener Werkstätte and the pochoir fashion plate, and should be distinguished from Art Nouveau, whose organic asymmetric line it displaced.

Era: 1908–1925

Region: Europe & North America