Art Deco Polemics and Synthesis Richard Striner TH E STUDY OF ART DECO becomes useful precisely when the quest for a perfectly delineated “style” yields to an appreciation of the volatility that characterized early twentiethcentury design. Much as the eclectic design of the nineteenth century served as a medium in which very different inspirations and creeds could influence one another, art deco in the 1920s and 1930s proved to be a middle range between antagonistic ideologies. In particular, it served as an important channel between radical and traditionalist design responses to twentieth-century challenges. I consider art deco to be a movement that drew on design ideas that emerged from the 1925 Paris exhibition and from the streamlining genre during the 1930s. It is well to regard these design impulses as closely related components of an overall movement rather than as two distinct movements, especially since commonalities and hybrid combinations were abundant by the 1930s, as much of the commercial architecture of the period demonstrates (fig. i). Even David Gebhard, the scholar most inclined to emphasize the so-called zigzag/streamline dichotomy, views these two as related subdivisions of an overall movement which he terms the “Moderne.” For convenience, the widely accepted term art deco serves equally well. Art deco designs were in a middle range between polarized tendencies. Gebhard has suggested that its exponents “assumed a lackadaisical middle course between the High Art Modernists and the Traditionalists.”2 This middle range of design could be a freewheeling expression of contemporaneity. It was a spirit that sought to express the vibrant temper of its times; it sought to capture the haunting savor of life in the jazz age, and later it sought to express the upbeat, modish, “streamlined” rhythms of life in the age of “swing.” It frequently exuded joie de vivre and celebrated progress through technology. But for all its exuberance, art deco was not an insubstantial movement, nor did it shrink from artistic complexities. At times it captured the fears, as well as the hopes, of the interwar period in Europe and America. Its mediational role was a function of its broad emotional range. Although utopian and futurist aspects of early twentieth-century design have been amply studied, design historians have not said enough about the angst of the interwar years: the sense among writers and artists that Western culture might be nearing decline and fall. In a period torn by upheavals, depression, persecutions, and the threat of recurrent war, many influential writers and artists believed that Western civilization might well be poised at the brink of either a disastrous cataclysm or a new historical cycle. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, T. S. Eliot’s poetry of desolation (contrasted to the splendor of classical achievements), the pathos of Leopold Bloom contrasted to the grandeur of Homer’s adventurer in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the cyclical theory in Arnold Toynbee’s books and essays—all of this conveys the milieu in which visionary commentators such as Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldous Huxley, and Le Corbusier propounded their theories, fears, and solutions. A knowledge of the interwar period’s apocalyptic moods (notwithstanding its equally important visions of technological utopia) provides a muchneeded basis for assessing the urgency suffusing the modernist, traditionalist, and middlerange responses to the period’s design agenda. To be sure, the threat of impending historical catastrophe affected both radical modernists and twentieth-century traditionalists. While the radicals sought to preempt disaster by a bold departure from the chaos of the past and present to a future world of order (as envisioned by Bauhaus philosopher designers), the traditionalists sought to stave off disaster by maintaining the continued vitality of classical order.
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