{"id":30866,"date":"2025-07-23T09:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T09:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/30866\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T09:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T09:13:10","slug":"bidding-adieu-to-art-decos-democratic-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/30866\/","title":{"rendered":"Bidding Adieu to Art Deco\u2019s Democratic Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

For sale: a 1,046-foot-tall, 77-story building with a footprint of 1,196,958 square feet, constructed in a steel frame and adorned in gray and white brick with reinforced steel accents, constructed 95 years ago. Located at 42nd and Lexington Avenue in New York City, the building, recently on the market, is expected to go cheap because of \u201cfaulty elevators, murky water fountains and pests,\u201d according to reports<\/a>. Realtors note that the nearly century-old structure lacks many of the contemporary amenities that both commercial and residential tenants require.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve certainly seen this listing before, whether in Margaret Bourke-White\u2019s 1929 construction photographs<\/a> featured in Time Magazine; portraits by Annie Leibovitz; or in the background of movies, from those of Woody Allen to The Avengers to Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s Megalopolis (2024), in which the character played by Adam Driver teeters on the edge of its iconic spire. The Empire State Building may be more famous, but the Chrysler Building \u2014 what its patron called a \u201cmonument to me\u201d \u2014 is arguably the more recognizable, with its tapered conical spire, its stylized eagle ornaments, its polished chrome the color of hubcaps. The preeminent example of that architectural and design style known as Art Deco, briefly the tallest building in the world before it would be unseated a few months after completion by the Empire State Building down the block, the Chrysler building is to glass and concrete what George Gershwin\u2019s \u201cRhapsody in Blue\u201d (1924) is to melody and rhythm; it is to brick and iron what oil and canvas is to the paintings of Georgia O\u2019Keeffe; it is to plate glass and aluminum what F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/a> (1925) is to sentences and paragraphs. With a spire that punctuates the New York night sky like a steeple above the vital hubbub of the streets below, the automotive company\u2019s iconic headquarters might be the very symbol of the 20th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Mayakovskaya metro station in Moscow (photo by Sergey A. via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/p>\n

It has been a century since the term \u201cArt Deco\u201d was coined, a shortened version of the name of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts and Industrial Style<\/a>, held in Paris in 1925. That the building is on the market \u2014 and a steal! \u2014 is a telling comment about the status of design and architecture, even of modernity and progress itself. In his classic All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity<\/a> (1982), critic Marshall Berman writes that the 20th century was defined by a \u201cmode of vital experience,\u201d the first time in history whereby innovation seemed to move everything from technology to society at incredible velocity to both exhilarating and disorienting effect. The Chrysler Building\u2019s discount sale represents the dissipation of that feeling into the toxic miasma of our current moment, when dreams of a vital future are endangered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Indeed, the decline in popularity of Art Deco in the postwar world, and the way it looks so clearly dated today, speaks to the decline not just in a style, but in the metanarratives that bolstered it, in the grand designs and triumphalist perspectives it traded in. As Robert McGregor of the Art Deco Trust in New Zealand put it<\/a>, the style marked a faith that there would be \u201cno more poverty, no more ignorance, no more disease,\u201d that it reflected \u201cconfidence, vigor and optimism\u201d via \u201csymbols of progress, speed and power.\u201d The narrative of Art Deco\u2019s decline is thus one of eclipse, of the end of na\u00efve beliefs in progress, first obliterated by the dual specters of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, which demonstrated the ultimate soulless logic of industrial technology, and continually negated in our own time<\/a>, during the fetid late afternoon of the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

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\t\tThe entrance of Tuschinski Theater in Amsterdam at night (photo by C messier via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Art Deco was the child of the totalizing dreams of earlier interrelated movements of modernity: Arts & Crafts, Beaux-Arts, Art Nouveau<\/a>, Vienna Secession. It was itself often known by a dozen different designations, from Jazz Moderne to Liberty Style, Odeon Style to Zigzag Moderne. By the 1968 publication of Bevis Hillier\u2019s Art Deco of the 20s and 30s<\/a>, the label derived from the Paris exhibition half a century before retroactively became the primary term associated with that heterodox style that sleekly valorized technology and abstracted nature. It drew from cultures as varied as Gothic Europe, East Asia, and the Mayans, not to mention avant-garde movements ranging from Cubism<\/a> to Primitivism to Constructivism<\/a> to De Stijl, to render a novel visual look. What must always be remembered about Art Deco, however \u2014 as a movement, style, mode, genre, what-have-you \u2014 is that it was an aesthetic birthed not from academies or manifestos, but from tangible material realities, a product of what was then cutting-edge technology. Before Hilliers could identify it, Art Deco had risen out of reinforced concrete and rebar, plate glass and aluminum \u2014 an industrial aesthetic as organically emergent as can be imagined.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The extraordinary thing, as Hillier notes, is that \u201cso rigorously formulated a style should have imposed itself so universally \u2014 on hairdressers\u2019 shops, handbags, shoes, lamp-posts and letter-boxes, as well as on hotels, cinemas, and liners.\u201d Indeed, Art Deco, for its diversity and often contradictions, is nonetheless an immediately recognizable style defined by sleekness and syncretism, velocity and vitality. And, as Hillier observed, it was once everywhere: the stylized sunrays that crown the Chrysler Building;\u00a0the dim-lit, cavernous lobby of Moscow\u2019s Mayakovskaya Station; the Rococo resplendence of Amsterdam\u2019s Tuschinski Theatre; the alabaster phallic monolith of Los Angeles City Hall. It was in theaters, post offices, and schools; in textiles, metalworks, fashion, glassworks, decorative arts, sculpture, and painting. Not just in New York, but in Los Angeles and Chicago, Tokyo and Bangkok, Paris and Berlin, Tulsa and Miami. It was, Hillier writes, \u201cthe last of the total styles,\u201d one that fused a utopian progressivism with an ecumenical taste, futurism with a certain melancholic pathos. Indeed, nothing has quite supplanted the psychic space Art Deco once held, whether it\u2019s the anemic International Style or totalitarian Brutalism<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Left: Adolf de Meyer, photo of Ballerina Desiree Lubovska wearing a dress designed by Jean Patou (c. 1929) (photo via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>); right: chair designed by Emile-Jacques Ruhmann, held by the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay (photo by Sailko via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/p>\n

In the French context, Art Deco was able to ascend to the heights expressed by the 1925 exhibition in part because it reflected a shift in the status of decorative artists. With the establishment of the National School of Decorative Arts in 1875, the French government elevated them from the status of mere artisans or craftsmen. In the Anglophone world, where there was no equivalent state imprimatur, there was the emergence of the Arts & Crafts movement, which similarly valorized that which was once considered mere ornament or utilitarian device. Everything from chairs to wallpaper, forks to cabinets, could embody the exalted status of art. This is crucial in Art Deco, in which design attains the heights of art while art is imbued with the democratic ethos of design.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Adepts in Art Deco produced utilitarian objects: the clean-carved, red-cushioned chairs with a geometric design produced in 1912 by Maurice Dufr\u00eane and Paul Follot, and the stunning green-and-yellow-fabric recliner with its curving circular pattern evocative of Chinese design, made by \u00c9mile-Jacques Ruhlmann in 1914, both exhibited at the Musee d\u2019Orsay; the bottled strength of New York Central\u2019s 20th Century Limited locomotive, with its futuristic, curved design in gleaming black; the unadorned, elegant black dress, designed by Jean Patou, that extenuated American dancer Desiree Lubovska\u2019s slender frame. Art Deco\u2019s tautological embrace of decoration, of design, was a variation on the Arts & Crafts movement\u2019s similar affection for the plastic arts, but without the sylvan, rusticated associations of a William Morris<\/a> or a Charles Rennie Mackintosh. By contrast, Art Deco was steadfastly urban, progressive, and technological.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"A recreation of Diego Rivera, \u201cMan at the Crossroads\u201d (1933), fresco, at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (photo by Gumr51 via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/p>\n

If Art Deco allowed art to descend from the heights to the mere realm of design, then it also allowed the opposite. Painters and sculptors consciously borrowed elements of Art Deco into their own compositions. See, for instance, Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, who translated the idiom from stone to canvas. Her 1930 \u201cSainte Th\u00e9r\u00e8se d\u2019Avila,\u201d held by the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, applies a smooth, abstracted, rectilinear style to the orgasmic expression of Bernini\u2019s famed Baroque sculpture; the closed eyes and agape mouth of the ecstatic figure framed in a nun\u2019s habit seems more architecture than textile. \u201cYoung Woman in Green,\u201d painted between 1927 and 1930 and now exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, presents a beautiful, blonde woman draped in a green dress that clings to her form; she\u2019s been translated into an assemblage of geometric relationships, spheres and columns, which does nothing to detract from how obviously stunning she is.\u00a0<\/p>\n

True to the egalitarian ethos of Art Deco, it was often a feature in proletarian art, from Mexican communist muralist Diego Rivera\u2019s since-destroyed Rockefeller Center lobby painting \u201cMan at the Crossroads\u201d from 1933, which infamously included Vladimir Lenin, to becoming virtually the house style of artists employed by the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA). American WPA painters adorned everything from federal office buildings to regional post offices in that unmistakable visual language. Then there are the monumental examples, from the massive, mountain-top \u201cChrist the Redeemer\u201d of 1931 in Rio de Janeiro, who holds his arms out in cruciform benediction, to the vaguely ominous personification of industry in the \u201cGuardians of Traffic\u201d on Cleveland\u2019s Hope Memorial Bridge constructed only a year later, two examples of how Art Deco made a faith out of industrial progress.<\/p>\n

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\t\tTamara de Lempicka, \u201cSainte Th\u00e9r\u00e8se d\u2019Avila\u201d (1930), oil on panel, held by the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City<\/p>\n

Architecture, however, is where Art Deco is most recognized. As just a short list: the American Radiator Building overlooking New York\u2019s Bryant Park, the emblazoned and glowing Rockefeller Plaza a few blocks away, the Byzantine grand lobby of Detroit\u2019s Guardian Building. Most arrestingly, it is marked by an attention to detail that has been all but erased in subsequent architectural styles bedeviled by pernicious minimalism. An Art Deco skyscraper, in its ornamentations and its moldings, bears more similarity to a Gothic cathedral than it does the average 5-over-1 Chipotle brutalist boxes that are continually rising over American cities in our current moment. The shining and sleek eagle gargoyles peering out from the corners of the Chrysler Building, the winged metal angel named \u201cSpirit of Light\u201d splayed atop Syracuse\u2019s Niagara Mohawk Building (1932), the sculpture of a hard-bodied laborer wrestling with a horse entitled \u201cMan Controlling Trade\u201d (1938) in front of Washington, DC\u2019s Federal Trade Commission Building \u2014 all examples of Art Deco\u2019s diversity in aesthetic unity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, even if the downfall of Art Deco represents the dissipation of its ideals, which were at its best democratic, a strain of triumphalist supremacy nonetheless runs through such work that at its worst could appear borderline dystopian. Skyscrapers, after all, have at least been co-opted to symbolize capitalist triumphism. \u201cTo be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world,\u201d writes Berman, \u201cand at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\t\tView of Lee Lawrie with colorist Leon V. Solon, \u201cWisdom\u201d (1939) (photo by Tony Hisgett via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Look no further than the frieze at Rockefeller Center, which stylizes a white-bearded deity with a compass, appearing nothing so much like an Art Deco version of William Blake\u2019s Urizen, who exclaims, \u201cWisdom and Knowledge Shall be the Stability of Thy Times.\u201d An ironic declaration, not least of all because it inverts Blake\u2019s warning about rationalism and positivism \u2014 in the Romantic poet\u2019s prophetic writings, it is precisely that commitment to knowledge over feeling, the hubris of the individual over the good of the many, that threatens our destruction. The translation of those favorite Art Deco motifs, such as palm fronds and flowers, peacocks and butterflies, into angular, trapezoidal, and geometric abstractions was a triumph of the mechanical over the organic, but also a demonstration of the technocratic philosophy that has brought us to this point. If Art Deco was an expression of capitalist faith in technological progress, then the unfettered excess of that same system is what pushes us to the precipice, as we anticipate the rising waters eventually flooding down 42nd and Lexington, the warm waves of the Atlantic lapping at the Chrysler Building\u2019s edifice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For sale: a 1,046-foot-tall, 77-story building with a footprint of 1,196,958 square feet, constructed in a steel frame…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[230,25931,228,226,227,229,88,831],"class_list":{"0":"post-30866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-architecture","9":"tag-art-deco","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-featured"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}