Art Deco in America

For the first time, a single volume comprehensively surveys the uniquely American contribution to art deco. This distinctive modernist decorative arts style was a popular choice for the architecture, interior design, furniture, illustration, graphic arts, ceramics, metalware and other accessories of the 1920s and 1930s.

Its imagery reflected the events of two key and contrasting decades in American history - celebrating the technological marvels of the modern age, the social frivolities of the roaring twenties, and the heroic workers of the depression years.

In its guises of zigzag moderne, classical moderne and the streamlined style, American art deco was practiced by multi-talented European immigrants - among them Eliel Saarinen, Paul Frankl, Joseph Urban and Kem Weber - as well as by numerous American-born architects and designers, including Ely Jacques Kahn, Raymond Hood, Bertram Goodhue, Donald Deskey, Gilbert Rohde and Rockwell Kent. Such newly emerging industrial designers as Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague and Henry Dreyfuss contributed to art deco's streamlined phase, while the architects, muralists and sculptors of the New Deal programs provided images of stability with their classicized buildings adorned with relief sculptures and murals of mythologized laborers.

The New Deal programs also provided an unwell, a key role in the development of American art deco. And the world's fairs of the thirties - the Chicago Century of Progress exposition, San Francisco's Golden Gate exposition, and the New York World of Tomorrow fair - summed up the currents of art deco. Decades later, this accessible and seductive style enjoyed a revival that influenced an entirely new generation of designers and postmodernist architects.

In this authoritative volume, distinctive photographs and an insightful text present the many fascinating dimensions of the world of art deco.