Art Deco and its ennemies

There are few terms in art history which have been used so haphazardly as 'art deco'. Art Deco is an essential decorative, eclectic and individualistic current which lacks formal unity, and so fails to qualify properly as a 'style'.

The term was invented in the 1960s to describe objects created in the 1920s, culminating in the Exposition internationale des art décoratifs e industriels modernes, held in Paris in 1925, where contemporary and modern design currents jostled for attention: the event marked an epoch and was to have a profound and wide ranging impact. How can we describe this aesthetic? That is precisely the question, because its manifestations draw both on the tradition of exotic woods, refined metals and floral decoration but also on modern art, from cubism to early abstract works. This is also a movement that hesitates between art for the burgeoning middle classes and art with a social conscience.

The 1925 Exposition turned out to be a sort of catalogue of these contradictions. In choosing as its theme the design for a French Embassy, the Société des Artistes Décorateurs betrayed a leaning towards 'good taste', but some of the designers – such as Robert Mallet-Stevens and Fernand Léger – ushered in the avant-garde.

In these circumstances, it was inevitable that the champions of modernism would soon pick a quarrel with Art Deco. The architect, Auguste Perret, raged that 'l’Art Décoratif should be done away with: I would first like to know whose idea it was to couple the words art and decorative. It’s monstrous: where real art exists, no decoration is needed'. Le Corbusier also hit out against the current: 'decorative art is just utensils, nice utensils', and also 'Great art lives on scanty means. Glitter is right for water.' (translated from Le Corbusier, L’Art décoratif aujourd’hui, first edition, 1925)

This presentation of José Berardo’s large collection of furniture and objects seeks to show Art Deco at its most successful, through figures such as Émile Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933) and Jean-Michel Frank (1895-1941), as well as René Lalique (1860-1945) or Jules Leleu (1883-1961). These objects are restored to the context of the 1925 Exposition, bearing witness to the taste of an epoch; alongside Maurice l’Herbier’s film, L’Inhumaine (1924), presented here in excerpts, these pieces present a virtual manifesto.

But the exhibition also shows the reaction from Art deco’s detractors, with Le Corbusier (1887-1965), Eileen Gray (1878-1976), Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) and Jean Prouvé (1901-1984). The museum here presents for the first time a rare example of Prouvé’s Pavillon démontable (a wood house), 600 x 900 cm, commissioned in 1944 to rehouse the inhabitants of Eastern France who had lost their homes in the bombing raids. This prefab is one of the latest acquisitions of the Museum collection and can be seen in the North terrace.