Episode 10 - The 1925 Paris Exhibition, Part 3

"I know it when I see it”

Final in a 3-part series on the 1925 Paris exposition and the Art Deco style.  In this episode I explore the origins of the Art Deco style, especially its roots in avant-garde art.  Plus the role of the forgotten giant of fashion Paul Poiret in packaging the avant-garde for the mass market.

To explore future:

• High-level overview of avant-garde art 
• Article on Antonio Sant'Ella 1910 Futurist building designs
• Unesco site, Centennial Hall, 1913, Wroclaw
  Video of Grosse Schauspielhaus , 1919 Berlin
• Article on 1914 Deutsche Werkbund exhibition, Cologne
• Colour video reconstruction of the Glass Pavilion, 1914 Deutsche Werkbund expo
• Article on Paul Poiret
• Article on Corbusier's Pavillion de l"esprit Nouveau, 1925
• World Heritage site on Corbusier's Cité Frugès, 1924

Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com

Photo credit:  Ambassador study-library, designed by Pierre Chareau, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris

Transcript

Episode 10 - The 1025 Paris Expo, Part 3

Welcome! To the tenth episode in the series “Talking Modernism”, the podcast about the 1920s and 30s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents changed the world. I am your host Michael Hauptman.

This is 3rd and epic final episode where I talk about about the 1925 Paris Expo that announced to the world. the style we know as Art Deco . I concluded the last episode with a triumphant Paris at the expo’s opening. In this episode I’ll discuss the sArt Deco tyle itself, and how it was shaped by various aspects of early 20th century modernism. Let’s start with art.

The modernist revolution in art

Of all the many changes wrought by modernism, one of the most distinctive was the revolution in Western art that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. Painting, for instance, had discovered the secret of perspective during the Renaissance, and this allowed paintings to be more realistic than ever before. But with the advance of photography in the 1800s, the ability of a painting to be realistic – the technical term is mimetic – seemed less and less important, and so began the trend in Western art ever since to depict things other than realistic  scenes or people or objects. The Romantic movement of the early 1800s led the way here. The British romantic painter Joseph Turner painted colourful and dramatic pictures of seas and mists and fire. In the course of his very long and prolific career – he died aged 76, and left a collection of over 500 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours and 30,00 sketches – as he progressed his works focused more and more on the effects of light and weather, whilst the subject became less and less realistic.

Turner’s ideas were further developed by Impressionists like Manet. These semi-realistic paintings attempted to capture the fleeting transitions of light and colour that early photography could not. Now, some researchers have argued that key Impressionist artists may have been suffering various defects of vision that explained their unique perspectives: that Monet’s paintings were blurry because he suffered from cataracts, and El Greco painted elongated figures due to astigmatism. So if not for the poor state of opthamology in the late 1800s, Impressionism might never have occurred. More convincing perhaps is the impact of the invention in 1841 of oil paints in tubes. This helped the Impressionists to work in the open air, capturing the effects of light on the spot. Apparently Renoir later said “without colors in tubes, there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists were to call Impressionism” 

Impressionism lasted for about 25 years, from the early 1860s to the late 1880s, with artists like Renoir, Monet and Degas. It then developed into Post-Impressionism, with artists like Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat and most famously Vincent van Gogh, and this movement lasted a further 20 years until about 1910. As each movement evolved, the subject being depicted became less and less realistic. Consider for instance Van Gogh’s famous sunflowers: coarse in texture and unrefined in shape, but a vivid study of shades of yellow and orange. Each of these movements went through a cycle where the artists were initially seen as wild radicals, there ideas ridiculed by critics, before being embraced by the mainstream. And making the artists and their agents very wealthy in the process.

Then, in the early decades of the 20th century, the pace of artistic innovation accelerated, and there came a quick succession of new artistic movements. With impressionism and post-impressionism the subject still had some semblance of reality, now painting and sculpture became dramatically less connected to world as perceived by a camera. First Fauvism replaced Impressionism’s semi-naturalistic colours and shading with solid blocks of vivid colors. Cubism then destroyed the concept of perspective entirely, presenting an object from multiple viewpoints at once. Rather than pretending that the canvas was a window to the 3 dimensional world, cubism embraced and emphasised the flat plane of the canvas. A cubist painting may contain the recognisable elements of a still life – a newspaper, a pipe, a glass of wine – but the flatness and shattered perspectives made it clear to the viewer they were seeing an artistic object, not an attempt at mimetic depiction. In 1929 the Surrealist Rene Magrite underlined the distinction between the real world and a work of art, with a painting of a smoker’s pipe emblazoned with the words “this is not a pipe”.

Then in 1895 came Expressionism, ushered in by Gustav Munch’s famous painting “The Scream”. Expressionism sought to express ,or even provoke, an individual’s emotional reaction to the world rather than depict the world itself. Expressionist artists like Wassily Kandinsky immersed themselves in the study how colour could invoke emotions, and even explored synesthesia, where certain colours make susceptible people hear the illusionary music. 

The Italian Futurists used the techniques of expressionism and cubism to celebrate the modern world, seeking to express its dynamism and movement, and made fetishes of the factory, the automobile, the aeroplane, and the power station.

As fine arts became less and less realistic, its influence on applied arts increased more and more. Indeed, this crossover was the single biggest influence on the Art Deco style that was showcased at the 1925 Paris Exhibition. And this was due to a multitude of factors. First, and perhaps most importantly, cubism shared with the Arts and Crafts movement an emphasis on the 2 dimensional representation. You might recall that in Episode 8 I described how in the mid-1800s the Arts and Arafts movement decried 3 dimensional decoration, such as the wallpaper with images of bridges and pagodas displayed at the “Chamber of Horrors” exhibition that Charles Dickens wrote about. The Arts & Crafts movement championed flat 2-dimensional patterns instead. And similarly, Cubism’s emphasis on straight lines and planes coincided with the aim of groups like the Deutsche Werkbund that I discussed in the previous episode, to create a design aesthetic appropriate to mass production – and straight lines were easier to mass produce than curves. And finally, expressionism and applied arts both shared a focus on colour and its effects on mood and emotions. The art of much the Avant-garde could easily be adapted to Art Deco decorative schemes, to the delight of customers and manufacturers and to the horror of many artists and critics. 

Next, the artists of the avant-garde were seen to be the ultimate bohemians: young, liberated and iconoclastic. And this attitude towards life was in tune with the spirit of the times, the ”Roaring 20s”. In Episode 5 I described the disillusionment of much of the generation who had endured the trenches of the Western Front. And for many, this found expression in a rejection of the certainties of the previous century that had been passed down by their parents, and they expressed this by adopting elements of bohemian artistic lifestyle, which set itself in opposition to the bourgeois, middle class fixities of their parents generation. 

And movements like Italian futurism, and its Soviet offshoot Constructivism, had a further link to modernity by celebrating the machine age, the motor car the aeroplane, the power station and factory. Expressionism could express the attractive elements of modern urban life, its dynamism and movement, as well as its alienation and injustice . By displaying this new avant-garde art, a consumer could signal that they embraced this new modernist spirit. 

Many artists decried the co-opting of their art for decoration and commerce. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, all art, should be quite useless. When a painter of the “art for art’s sake’ conviction creates a work, they generally do not consider where it will it will hang, how well it will fit in with its surroundings, its context. These are the concerns of the decorative artist. I recall a cartoon from many years ago where a prospective client was enthusiastically praising a painting “such vision! Such insight! Such command of the medium!’ before concluding “a pity they didn’t consider the size of my wall safe”. 

But the distinction the the West made between artist and decorator – and it was a Western distinction, traditional Islamic art for instance made no such distinction – began to blur under modernism. One straightforward reason was that as fine art became less realistic under cubism and the like, artists who still favoured representation transitioned to the ‘broader church’ of applied arts. But also important was the conviction of many artists at the time, that art could change the world if it expanded beyond the confines of the painting frame. And I make mention once again the German concept of Gesamptkunstverk, which roughly translates as “total work of art”. The concept of Gesampkunstverk was originally applied to Wagner's operas, epic in scope and encompassing artforms other than music, such as drama, costume and set design, to unite the audience and performers in a total, immersive, transformative experience. In Episode 8 I mentioned how Art Nouveau extended the concept of Gesampkunstverk from opera to architecture, where architects like Antoni Guardi and Joseph Hoffman designed every aspect of the house in a consistent style: funiture, doorhandles, light fittings and cutlery. 

The concept of gesumptkunksversk was extended to the new avant-garde styles, especially in architecture. The Salon d’Automne of 1912 featured a rather frightening model of a cubist house. But it was expressionism, and its offshoots futurism, contructionism and de stijl, that saw the biggest crossover between avant-garde art and applied arts. Futurism had the explicit modernist aim, as expressed in its manifesto published in 1910, of destroying the rigid and historic bourgeoisie order by extending confrontational futurist art into every aspect of everyday life. Futurists invented performance art. There was futurist music, futurist clothing and futurist cinema. n 1930 there was even published “The Futurist Cookbook” that was only semi-comic in intent. Here is there recipe for “Aerofood”, that anticipated Hestor Blumenthal by 80 years: 

The diner is served from the right with a plate containing some black olives, fennel hearts and kumquats. From the left he is served with a rectangle made of sandpaper, silk and velvet. The foods must be carried directly to the mouth with the right hand while the left hand lightly and repeatedly strokes the tactile rectangle. In the meantime the waiters spray the napes of the diners’ necks with a perfume of carnations while from the kitchen comes contemporaneously a violent music of an aeroplane motor and some music by Bach.

Futurism remained a fringe idea even in its birthplace of Italy. At an exhibition of Futurist Sacred Art for instance, an unimpressed Pope Pius XI said “our ardent wish is that we will never have this art in our churches.” But the concepts were more widely adopted in the Soviet Union in the early years of the Russian revolution in a movement known as Constructivism. The avante-garde artists there declared “an end to easel painting”, the artform of the hated bougousie, and instead sought to introduce agitprop art to everyday life to further the Bolshevik goal of remaking society as a Communist utopia, working like Futurism on textiles, cinema and clothing. 

And finally the Netherlands at the end of WW1 saw an art and design movement called “De Stijl”, which has the dual meaning of “the style” and “the column”. Inspired by metaphysics, De Stijl held that the true essence of the world was best depicted as an asymmetric right angled frame of beams, planes and rectangles, its palette restricted to black, white, and the primary colours red, blue and yellow. The painter Piet Mondrian was its most famous adherent, but it also produced a small but very influential number of works in furniture, architecture and interior design.

Intriguing as futuristic food and Constructivist clothing might have been, it was in the field of graphic design though that these movements had their biggest impact. Graphic design is a low cost, ephemeral medium that allowed experimentation – its one thing to produce a futurist-inspired poster, another thing entirely to invest in a futurist-inspired line of clothing. And graphic design also favoured the 2 dimensional nature of avant-garde painting which was the source of Futurism and Constructivism. Two of the best examples of Constructivist graphic art are the simple yet eloquent geometric shapes in the 1919 propaganda poster “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” by artist El Lissitzky, and also the photo montage in the 1924 poster “Books (Please)! In All Branches of Knowledge”, by Alexander Rodchenko. I’ve provided links to these on the podcast website. This new graphic art style: novel, bold, simple, and able to communicate a lot of information in a single glance, was co-opted by the capitalist world and drove a revolution in advertising posters, many of which were on display at the 1925 Paris Expo. 

Expressionist architecture and the 1914 Deutsche Werkbund exhibition

Futurism and Constructivism also produced many designs for new architecture, most notably the 1912 designs by Antonio Sant'Elia for a futurist city, so space age that they were adapted by Fritz Lang for his 1927 movie Metropolis 15 years later, and again 60 years later for Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner. And Constructivist architect Vladimir Tatlin designed a helical slanted tower as a monument to Communism that was to be 1/3 higher than the Eiffel Tower. 

Most of these grand designs remained however paper exercises. At the time, Italy and the Soviet Union had neither the desire nor the resources to actually build these flights of fancy. But in Northern Europe in the years between 1910 and 1921, with a break of course for WW1, there were completed a number of important examples of Expressionist architecture. I mentioned earlier that Expressionist painting, rather than depicting the world, aimed to express an observer’s reaction to world, using distorted forms and unnatural colour to suggest and excite feelings and emotions. The shadowy world of the subconscious that psychoanalysis like Freud and Jung had begun to explore. Similarly, Expressionist architecture sought to speak to it’s inhabitant’s inner world though distorted forms, often organic in inspiration. In this it shared some similarities with some of the Art Nouveau architects like Gaudi. And indeed some of the key Expressionist architects had earlier worked in Art Nouveau, notably the Belgian Henry van de Velde and German Bruno Taut. 

And like their Art Nouveau predecessors, Expressionist architects sought to exploit the potential of modern materials and techniques, especially reinforced concrete and large panes of glass, to bring their fantastic visions to life. For instance, the Jahrhunderthalle  or Centennial Hall, built in 1913 in what is now the Polish city of Vhrostlav, was big enough to house an audience of 10k under a lacework dome of glass and reinforced concrete. And in Berlin in 1919 was completed the Großes Schauspielhaus, sadly demolished in the 1990s, another reinforced concrete building that seated an audience of 3 and a half thousand under a huge dome hung with abstract stalactites, all painted a deep exciting red. 

Expressions architecture of the early 1920s, especially the work by architect Erich Mendelssohn, would directly influence a distinctive sub-type of art deco known as streamline moderne, but that happened in the 1930s and is outside the scope of our current discussion. A fascinating story though that I’d like to explore in a future episode.

In May of 1914 the Deutsche Werkbund opened a major exhibition in Cologne that included a number of buildings in the new Expressionist style. In particular a fantastic multicoloured glass pavilion designed by architect Bruno Taut that was the signature building of the expo. Words and indeed black-and-white photography really don’t do justice to this kaleidoscope of a building, so I’ve included a link on the podcast website to a colour video reconstruction, along with links to the Jarhundrethalle and the Grosses Schauspielhaus.

The last great event of the belle Epoch, the Cologne exhibition attracted over 1 million visitors in those warm summer days scarcely 6 weeks before the start of WW1, to admire the more than 80 modern residential and commercial buildings on display, as well as a model village and an amusement park. And seeing how sophisticated, innovative and indeed prescient of future architecture styles that these buildings were, it is hard not to feel sad that a culture that could create such a display would soon be almost destroyed by the holocaust of WW1. 

From the avant-garde to art deco

Art deco is a slippery term. In 1964 a chief justice of the US Supreme court said: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced by the term... [b]ut I know it when I see it”. He was talking about pornography, but the definition works almost as well for Art Deco. On one hand, items on display at the 1925 Paris expo undoubted displayed a stylistic coherence. As one commentator noted at the time: “all the works of art collected here show a family resemblance which cannot fail to be noted by even the most casual observer”. But as a more recent scholar wrote: 

 “We have allowed the term Art Deco to embrace virtually everything that was produced between the two world wars, from the finest French furniture of Pierre Legrain to the tubes of Tangee lipstick purchased from the local five-and-dime. Surely there’s a world of difference”

Art deco is then perhaps better described as a general tendency rather than a distinct style. And this tendency was a compromise between the exciting but radical new art movements – cubism, expressionism and the like - and the tried-and-true approaches of traditional applied art. Art deco was the moderation of the avant-garde to make it acceptable to a wider market. And the names that Britain and the US gave to the style of the 1925 expo are telling: Jazz moderne or zig-zag moderne where “moderne” was spelled with an “e” at the end. And just like “ye olde worlde” also spelled with an “e” at the end, refers to a false manufactured antique style, “moderne” referred to a style that celebrated modernism without actually being particularly modern at its core. It retained the traditional strong emphasis on decoration, but the decoration was now abstract, drawing on the styles and motifs of the avant-garde, especially the flattened perspective, straight lines and sharp angles of cubism, the vivid solid colours and symmetrical massing of early expressionism. 

There are a number of distinctive designs and patterns that tended to re-occur in Art Deco and can help us identify it. One was the “ fountain” motif, with vertical lines ending in rounded spirals. Another were simple geometric chevrons and zig-zags, which the name “zig-zag moderne” alludes to. Sunbursts abounded, with connotations of both hygiene and rebirth. There were personifications of speed and motion, such as the gazelle, cheetah and the goddess Artemis, or of power, like lions and bears and the goddess Diana. And also images drawing from Futurism that celebrate urbanism and technology: the skyscraper, the factory and finally the aeroplane and motor car, these often depicted with trailing “speed lines” to suggest motion.

Five pavilions from the Paris Expo

Let’s illustrate now by looking at some of the exhibits at the 1925 Paris expo, and I’ve included links to them on the podcast website. 

Art deco had two strands, and both were on display at the expo. The first is what we can call “Modernised traditional”, where an essentially traditional building or object incorporated abstract decorations. A good example is the Bon Marche pavilion. The architect Louis-Hippolyte Boileau used a classical composition for the facade, but instead of conventional detailing he included a spectacular stained-glass window showing a double-sunburst that dominated the facade, as well as grill-work incorporating fountains and zig-zags, and it also had chevron patterns impressed in the plaster walls, which was painted to look like concrete.

One of the highlights of the 1925 Paris expo was the pavilion”Hotel d’un Collectionneur”, the imaginary house of a wealthy individual. Like the Bon Marche pavilion it was essentially classical in proportion but incorporating a curved central bay borrowed from Expressionist architecture. The pavilion was coordinated by Jaques-Emile Ruhlmann, the most celebrated cabinet maker of his day, and contained some astonishingly beautiful and luxurious furniture, again of essentially traditional design but embellished with modern abstract decoration. A good example is the sideboard in the Grand Salon. A traditional form executed in black laquer, essentially plain except for an incised silver decoration showing an Aztec wolf largely executed in zig-zag lines.

The second strand of Art deco we can call “Decorative modern”, and here the somewhat severe undecorated functional style characterised by the Bauhaus school and Le Courbousier was livened up with applied decoration and colour. A good example is the Tourism and Information Pavilion by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens. This was a hall and an adjoining clock tower 35 meters high, the tallest and most prominent structure in the expo. The building was essentially functionalist in conception, simple flat horizontal and vertical planes recalling Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School and Dutch modernist architect Willem Dudok. But the pavilion also incorporated extensive decoration, from the red feature wall that breaks up the white colour scheme to the vaguely futurist and constructionist embellishments on the clock-tower , plus bas-reliefs showing scenes of transport and of France’s colonial empire.

Another example of decorative modern is the pavilion of the Primavera design studio of the Printemps department store. A reinforced concrete dome vaguely reminiscent of the Expressionist Jahrhunderthalle but instead of plain skylights it was studded with large multicoloured glass lenses made by Lalique, which gave the impression of large pebbles still wet from the sea. At night illuminated from within, it must have been quite a sight. 

In the last episode I mentioned the Societe des Artistes Decoratuers, SAD, the Society of Decorative Artists, who were one of the main driving forces behind the revitalisation of French applied arts industry after 1910. For the 1925 Expo they were commissioned by the Government to present a suite of furniture for a hypothetical future embassy, This included a study designed by Pierre Chareu which you can still see today displayed at Paris’ Museum of Decorative Arts. The round room is based around a functionalist, undecorated louvered cupola in palmwood, that also incorporated fitted shelves, plus a simple somewhat cubist-inspired desk, but softened by a decorative rug by Jean Lurça in orange and yellow with an outline of a mermaid.

All these examples are French but similar examples of the “Art Deco” approach could be seen at all of the countries’ exhibits, with the notable exception of the Soviet Union’s pavilion, a distinctly futuristic Constructivist building by architect Konstantin Melnikov, incorproating a wall of glass and a crossed diagonal framework over steeply descending stairs. Plus another important pavilion I’ll discuss shortly. And each nation addressed art Deco differently, the style embraced eclecticism from the start . The Polish and Czech exhibits for instance incorporated peasant vernacular designs that had been abstracted – local national references would have been important for these new nations. Sweden and Denmark tended to favour art deco designs of neoclassical inspiration.

But in 1925 it was France that had adopted the art deco’s masss-market version of the avante-garde most enthusiastically. And was due in small measure to the pioneering efforts of a largely forgotten giant of fashion, the couturier Paul Poiret. 

Paul Poiret and the Ballet Russe

The revolution in Western art that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century might be one of the most well known changes wrought by modernism. But much more impactful was the revolution that occurred in western women’s fashion at the same time. Women’s fashion in 1900 was characterised by the s-bend corset, which thrust the hips backwards and the bosom forward, with heavily structured gowns built on layers of petticoats, and puffy, frilly blouses embellished with lace and ribbons. But by 1919 the corset had been discarded and the petticoat had disappeared. Clothes had become generally looser, and women altogether more liberated, at least in their clothing. This revolution in fashion had several sources, including the experience of practical work clothing when middle-class women entered the workforce in large numbers during WW1. But the most significant catalyst was the work of Paris couturier Paul Poiret. Poiret pioneered this new style of liberating clothing for his wealthy clients in the years between 1903 and 1914, and these innovations quickly transformed the entire industry. By rights his name should be as well known as Coco Chanel and Yves St Laurent. But after achieving singular fame – his 1908 collection abandoning the corset made front page news around the world – and fortune - in 1911 he hosted a party called “1,002 nights” to celebrate his ottoman-inspired collection that consumed 900 litres of champagne – he died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1944 at the age of 67.

Poiret pioneered a radical approach to dressmaking that relied on the skills of draping, working with fabric directly on the body, rather than tailoring and pattern making. Looking to antique and regional dress, especially the Empire line of the early 1800s, Poiret advocated clothing cut along straight lines and constructed of rectangles. It was an approach that effectively established the paradigm of modern fashion, irrevocably changing the direction of costume history.

The list of fashion innovations that he and his wife and muse Denise introduced in the ten years between 1904 when he opened his own fashion house and 1914 when he joined the French war effort as a military tailor s nothing short of astonishing. Maison Poiret was the first fashion house to develop a trademark, a stylisied rose. He was the first fashion house was the first to issue a fragrance, named for his first daughter, Rosine. He was the first to sell copies of his couture garments, labeled “genuine reproductions”. He pioneered trunk shows, setting out with nine models on a tour of Russia and central Europe where he was feted as a genius. He was the first couturier to extend into interior design, founding the Maison Martine in 1911, named for his second daughter. Branches were opened throughout Europe and department stores in the US  and Germany sold Martine merchandise. He even founded a design school, the Ecole Martine, that encouraged his students to explore their imaginations, discover their inner child, which anticipated some elements of the Bauhaus teaching program. For ten years, he could not put a foot wrong and everything he touched turned to gold.

I mentioned earlier in this episode how the lines between fine art and applied art were blurring at the start of the twentieth century. No-one exemplified this better than Poiret. He had a deep love of art, and considered his work on par with them: “It seems to me we practice the same craft,” he declared in his autobiography. He counted several leading artists of the avante garde amongst his friends, including Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. Indeed it was at Poiret’s Galerie Barbazanges in 1911 that Picasso held the first public showing of his groundbreaking Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. Later, in the 1920s, he encouraged the American Surrealist photographer Man Ray to first try his hand at fashion photography.

Poiret in his heyday had a keen sense of the spirit of the age, and was able to produce fashion that captured that spirit. And in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century that spirit was modernism. And its catalyst, the lightning rod, was the ballet troupe formed in 1909 by Russian impressario Sergei Diaghilev, the Ballet Russe. 

I talked about the Ballet Russe back in Episode 3 discussing the tumultuous 1913 premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring. Its hard to overstate the impact the Ballet Russe had on French society. Ballet at the time, in its birthplace of Italy and France, had become hidebound, rigid and formulaic, not to mention boring. But Russia had taken the Western form of ballet and improved it with new approaches and athletic styles. Diaghilev saw ballet as the new exemplar of gesumpkunstverk – there’s that word again! - superior to Wagner’s operas which were the original gesumptkuntsverk as he felt dance would more directly engage with an audience than singing as there was no need to strain to interpret the words in an operatic aria. Sets and costumes were designed by leading artists,. For the music, new works were commissioned from leading composers like Stravinsky and Debussy. And unlike in the Western ballet tradition, where the dancers simply attempted to relate their movements to the music, the Ballet Russe sought to express the music in their movement, seeking guidance here from the the American dancer Isadora Duncan and her new dance philosophy of ‘eurythmics’

When the Ballet Russe troupe introduced the Russian style of ballet to western Europe it created a huge sensation. It reinvigorating the art of performing dance, and revitalised ballet in the West. But its influence extended far beyond ballet. The Ballet Russe affected the Paris upper class in 1909 in a similar way that the Beatles influenced Western culture in the 1960s. The dancers became superstars, their antics and outfits breathlessly reported in the society pages. For their 1910 season the Ballet Russe presented the Rimsky-Koraskov ballet Schéhérazade , with exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes designed by Leon Bakst, which sparked a craze for orientalism. Poiret, a keen fan of the Ballet Russe himself, launched his 1911 collection with a similar middle-eastern exotic slant, featuring turbans, harem pants and tunic tops. Society women went wild for the new style, a chance to sit in the audience of the Ballet Russe in a costume similar to their new idols. The fashionable set could celebrate the modernistic bohemian avante-garde for an evening before returning to their comfortable bourgoise homes. In this packaging of the avant-garde for the mass market, Poiret anticipated the art deco style by ten years. 

After WW1 he recommenced his business, but his keen sense of the zeitgeist had abandoned him. He failed to adapt his style to the new athletic, casual style championed by new designers like Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Then came a series of bad business decision. He converted his garden first into a nightclub and then an open air theatre that failed after 6 months. He invested heavily to set up an unofficial exhibit at the 1925 expo, outfitting 3 barges moored on the Seine. But the orders never came, the public had fastened on new designers. In a rather sad incident, he once chided Coco Chanel, famous inventor of the “little black dress”:

“Madame, all your designs are in black. Who are you in mourning for?”

Chanel replied, I only imagine archly:
 
 “For your career, monsuier”

In 1928 his wife Denise left him in. In 1929 he sold his business house, and the remaining stock of this once dominant fashion house were sold as rags. Poiret rapidly slid into destitution, not helped by hos complete inability to budget. At one time his friends collected 40,000 French francs to help him out. Poiret reputedly immediately spent it on a telescope, a refrigerator and a lot of premier Cru Champagne. By the 1930s he was begging strangers to pay for food and drink in cafes. The man once called “The king of fashion” would have beeninterred in a pauper’s grave had not Elsa Schiaparelli paid for his burial. 

If ever a person deserved the description “they were ahead of their time”, it was Paul Poiret. An 2017 retrospective of Poiret at the Art Museum in The Haag dubbed him “The Father of Art Deco”. A more fitting title was that he was Art Deco’s John the Baptist. He helped Paris cultivate a taste for commercialised avant-garde that would blossom by 1925.

Le Courbusier and Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau

The 1925 Paris Expo was almost completely dominated by the Art Deco style, with one singular, prophetic exception. Like a worm in an apple, or like the evil fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, there was one pavilion that hurled a challenge at the art deco style, indeed at the very concept of decoration itself. Art deco had its moment f triumph, but this lone pavilion, the Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau, was the truer predictor of the direction that architecture and design would take over the long term. Art Deco, after its truimph at the 1925 expo, would last scarcely 15 years, it would burn out by 1939. But the functional international style that the Pavilon de l'Esprit Nouveau represented continues to dominate interior design to this day, 

The pavilion was the work of the visionary architect known as Le Courbusier. He developed it on behalf of the architecture journal L’Esprit Noveau, the New Spirit, where he had written a series of articles on his conception of architecture that he had published in a 1923 book “Vers une Architecture”, published in English as “Towards a New Architecture”. I mentioned this book in the first episode of this series, its considered by many to be the most influential architecture book written in the twentieth century. 

The Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau was the demonstration of Courbusier’s prescription for good residential design. And it looks like it could have been built yesterday, so accurate was his vision. A white cube 2 stories high, with a double high living space facing a full height glass wall, as well as a courtyard garden. And also prescient was the furnishings. Fitted cupboards abounded, and with utilitarian mass produced furniture, some sourced from a hospital supplier. This was efficient housing aimed at the mass market, a dwelling “cell” that could be repeated and combined as needed. Indeed the pavilion reflected just such an approach he utilised in a workers’ housing project a year earlier near Bordeaux, the Cite Fruges, now a World Heritage site. And if you really want to see what the original pavilion looked like, you can visit a full sized reproduction in Bologna in Italy.

The contrast with the decorative opulence of the rest of the 1925 exposition could not have been more stark, and Courbusier ‘s provocative display inevitably drew the ire of the expos organisers. They sited his pavilion at the outskirts of the exhibition, and even surrounded it with a 4 meter high fence, which fortunatelty the Minister of Fine Arts, who came to inaugurate the exhibition, ordered its removal. The jindependent jury of the Exhibition wanted to award Corbousier’s pavilion a gold medal, but the French Academy des Beaux Arts, overruled them on the grounds that “there was no architecture” in the pavilion! The ensuing scandal gave Corbusier more publicity than if he had actually won.

Corbusier repaid the censure of the organising committee in spades. His conception of domestic architecture was that a house was “a machine for living”, and by that he meant that just as a machine is designed to satisfy requirements, a house should be designed to be as practical and efficient and cost-effective as possible, to deliver its occupants maximum comfort and utility. The social imperative of architects to deliver high quality affordable housing was uppermost in Corbusier’s mind, and he rejected decoration of architecture as both costly and pointless: pointless because a well designed functional building would be aesthetically attractive without decoration. Corbousier’s book “Towards a new architecture” had pictures of ancient greek temples alongside photors of modern aeroplanes and ocean liners, because for Corbusier both were examples of aesthetically pleasing and functionally effcient design. The luxurious decorative display of the 1925 expo characterised everything that he loathed in architecture and design. 

A skilled polemiscist, he published an essay in 1925, the year of the expo, entitled “L’Art Decoratif d’ajourdui”, Decorative art today”. In it he took aim at the fundamental conception of th eexpo as expressed in its name, the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes”, especially the conjunction “Arts Decoratifs”, decorative art. For Corbusier, “Decorative art” was an oxymoron. Courbusier was not against art – indeed he was an artist before he was an architect, and his pavilion was hung with cubist paintings by Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. But like the Arts and Crafts movement I mentioned in episode 7, Corbusier believed that the only valid art could be preduced by humans, he utterly rejected the contention of the Deutsche Werkbund and the French SAD that it was possible to create valid art suitable for mass production. And he also rejected the Expressionist, Futurist and Constructionist programs to extend art into architecture and design. The Russian Constructivists had sough to “free art from the easel” – Corbusier wanted to send it back. It was Corbusier’s 1925 essay that first coined the phrase “Art Deco”, but as a term of scorn and derision. 

Lone pavilon it may have been, but the functionalist principles of the Pavilion L’Esprit Nouveau were to ultimately triumph over the Art Deco aesthetic. The world would soon to be plunged into the Great Depression, and austerity favoured Courbusier’s functionalist principles much better that the luxurious aesthetic showcased at the Paris Expo. Soon his radical ideas became the prevailing architecture style, now known as Internationalism, that was to hold sway until the 1970s and is still influential today.

Looking back at 1925

I was excited to come across a new new word recently:Anemoia . Anemoia means to feel nostalgic for a time you’ve never experienced. Researching this episode, I felt Anemoia for the 1925 Paris Expo and the heyday of art deco. And it made me wonder could such a movement happen today? 

Certainly interior design over the last decade seems less confident than it was in 1920s Paris. Contemporary interior design is many and varied, But a recent column in the Guardian newspaper described the dominant style as “A millennial perversion of mid-century modernism”. Shops and websites selling knock-off Eames chairs or cut-price Danish modern sofas abound. 

Why does Courbusier’s functional modernism persist, whilst the decorative impulse that led to Art Deco is gone? And what might it tell us about how today’s culture differs to that 100 years ago? For me, the key point is that Art Deco was ephemeral, and what I mean by that, it celebrated the here-and-now. That’s why it often incorporated images of biplanes, motor cars and flappers. And the spirit it expressed was the optimistm, or in retrospect the naive optimism, of 1925 Paris, for the fortunate a time of excess and excitement, the age of jazz, the fast car and faster women. The decoration of Art Deco expressed that optimism, excitement and confidence in the future. And when that optimistic age was destroyed by WW2, Art Deco died too. Ephemeral art depends on context. In the context of 1925 Paris, it made perfect sense. As the context changes, and of course it inevitably does, the style dates and ages and becomes old-fashioned. 

Courbusier’s functional style though, expresses objective ‘rational’ values that do not change, require no context. A house well designed as a “machine for living” can serve generations, the lack of decoration enhances its longetivity. But also, a functional style object carries relatively little record of the spirit of the times when it was made. 

Art deco certainly wasn’t the last of the ephemeral styles. In the 60’s for instance there a pop-art period, reflecting that decade’s fascination with mass media and consumerism. And the style was inspired by the pop-art works of artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstien, similar to how Art Deco was inspired by Cubism and Expressionism. In the 1970s, punk fashion reflected a time of economic stagnation and political turmoil. The fashion excess of the 80s, big hair, shoulder pads and cartoonish Memphis room dividers reflected a time of laisse-faire capitalism under Reagan and Thatcher.

Perhaps then Millenials like mid-century modern as they don’t find the current age inspiring. Not exciting enough to inspire an optimistic style like Art Deco. Not depressing enough to inspire a new punk wave. A lukewarm age that inspires people to surround themselves with anonymous, timeless furnishings that will hold their value.

Things always change though. The same Guardian article that described the Millenial’s love of mid-century modern also suggested that the next generation may be rejecting warmed-over functionalism. “Gen Z like to be quirky”, a 20-year-old says. ” Maybe it’s a general fear of being basic.”

An so we come to the end of the episode, and the end of this series. I hope you’ve found it interesting, and I’ve certainly enjoyed the opportunity to share some information on the fascinating, long-ago world of modernism. If you have been listening, I’d love to hear from you. Please do email me at talkingmodernism@gmail.com with any suggestions, topics that you’d like to hear me present or even just to say hi. at. I’ll be taking a break for a few weeks whilst I decide what topic I’d like to talk about next. I look forward to speaking with you again soon.