American Art Deco

Art Deco architecture flourished in large cities and small towns throughout America in the 1920s and 1930s. The style is now captured in over 500 color photos of 75 lavish and innovatively designed buildings across the country that have been preserved both outside and in, giving the full scope of this beloved, exciting style.

Art Deco was the most important decorative style of the late 1920s and 1930s, and its expression in America was seen in virtually every area of the fine and decorative arts: architecture, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, silver, graphic arts, and jewelry. This splendid book explores the dynamic tradition of Art Deco in America and, in over 500 illustrations, reveals the beauty and extent of the style as it was manifested here.

Inspired, in part, by the industrial age and Native American art, and championed by progressive architects, American Art Deco was one of the most popular decorative styles of the 20th century. This volume includes scores of photographs and important articles that describe the aesthetics of this great mode of artistic expression.An introduction by architectural critic Lewis Mumford is followed by comments from such notables as Frank Lloyd Wright on design principles; theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes on outfitting business interiors; and Edward Steichen on commercial photography. A fascinating glimpse of an exciting and innovative era in the history of American design, this book will appeal to architects, graphic artists, photographers, and lovers of the Art Deco style. Over 200 black-and-white illustrations.

Filled with color examples of art, architecture, and decorative craft, this volume explores America's contribution to one of the 20th century's most influential artistic movements.

Beginning with the dreams of Hollywood and ending in its lobbies and boulevards, A Journey through American Art Deco passes through a series of itineraries that include the most interesting examples of Art Deco, from Chicago to New York, from Denver to Phoenix, from Seattle to Los Angeles and Miami Beach. The most notable highlights of the journey are New York and Los Angeles, with their long list of Art Deco monuments. At the great Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, American designers encountered the new style, then called moderne. Once in the U.S., European Deco turned into American Deco, utilizing clean, geometric lines and industrial materials such as steel, plastic, and glass, to adorn the interiors of hotels, stores, movie theaters, and transatlantic liners, and to give a characteristic stamp to building exteriors. This new style came to symbolize the country with its combination of art and industry.

An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class. Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design. Through this comprehensive approach to one of the 20th century’s most pervasive modes of expression in America, Art Deco Chicago provides an essential overview of both this influential style and the metropolis that came to embody it.

work on the subject for many years to come." "With over 1,000 illustrations in colour and black-and-white." --Book Jacket.

For graphic artists, industrial designers, and anyone with an interest in the evolution of modern advertising icons, product packaging, and marketing principles, this book offers a fascinating glimpse into a formative era of the American commercial arts.