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Descriptive term applied to a style of decorative arts that was widely disseminated in Europe and the USA during the 1920s and 1930s. Derived from the style made popular by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, the term has been used only since the late 1960s, when there was a revival of interest in the decorative arts of the early 20th century. Since then the term ‘Art Deco’ has been applied to a wide variety of works produced during the inter-war years, and even to those of the German Bauhaus. But Art Deco was essentially of French origin, and the term should, therefore, be applied only to French works and those from countries directly influenced by France.

The development of the Art Deco style, or the Style moderne as it was called at the time, closely paralleled the initiation of the 1925...

(Percy)

(b London, April 8, 1881; d London, April 15, 1939).

English designer. His early life was divided between the stage and the sea. He was a theatre designer in London and New York, and his stage career continued after World War I service and his survival of the sinking of the Lusitania. In 1924 he was Consultant Artistic and Technical Director of the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, London, designing murals and restaurant interiors, as well as presentations in the Government Theatre (‘Attack on Zeebrugge’) and the Admiralty Theatre (‘Air attack on London’). He is chiefly remembered for his design work for J. Lyons & Co., the London hotel and catering firm. Bernard’s displays of marble, glass and chromium plate were dazzling but inexpensive. For the Tottenham Court Road Corner House (1926), London, he made an inlaid marble decoration of Niagara Falls, now covered over. The entrance to the Strand Palace Hotel (1930–31; dismantled, parts in London, V&A) was one of London’s few Art Deco extravaganzas. Bernard also had a lively interest in the Modern Movement, assisting in ...

(b Blue Earth, MN, Nov 23, 1894; d Vero Beach, FL, April 20, 1989).

American interior and industrial designer. Deskey gained a degree in architecture and studied painting before working in advertising. From 1922 to 1924 he was head of the art department at Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA. In 1921 and 1925 he made trips to Paris, where he attended the Ecole de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi, before returning to New York in 1926 as a champion of modern art and design. In 1926–7 he created the city’s first modern window displays for the Franklin Simon and Saks Fifth Avenue department stores. In 1927 he was joined by the designer Philip Vollmer, and the partnership became Deskey–Vollmer, Inc. (to c. 1929). Deskey expanded into designing interiors, furniture, lamps, and textiles, becoming a pioneer of the Style moderne (as Art Deco was known in America). His earliest model for the interior of an apartment was shown at the American Designers’ Gallery, New York, in ...

(b 1876; d 1955).

French designer of furniture, glass, metal, ceramics and interiors. He was a pioneering exponent of Art Deco and a detractor of Art Nouveau, which in practice meant that he aspired to a style that was neither historical nor mannered. Dufrène was a founder-member in 1901 of the Société des Artistes-Décorateurs (SAD). He inaugurated a range of furniture in very dark native wood and defended functionalism and the use of mechanical processes and mass production. In ...

(b Paris, July 17, 1877; d Sainte-Maxime, nr St Tropez, 1941).

French designer. He was a leading designer of furniture and interiors in the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco before World War I and in the subsequent popularization of the Art Deco style. He was a pupil of Eugène-Samuel Grasset in Paris, and his earliest designs, in the Gothic style, were published in Art et Décoration, the journal of design reform founded in 1887. From 1899 Follot was designing bronzes, jewellery and textiles for La Maison Moderne, the commercial outlet for Art Nouveau objects, and his interior design for a study, shown in 1904 at the first Salon of the Société des Artistes-Décorateurs, of which he was a founder-member, demonstrated his affinity with the prevailing curvilinear characteristics of Art Nouveau. Follot’s design for a study shown at the same Salon in 1909 revealed a change towards simpler, more rectilinear forms inspired by the revival of Neo-classicism, which became characteristic of his style. He employed light woods, ornamented with carved and gilded fruits, garlands and cornucopias (e.g. chair, ...

(b Vienna, Oct 14, 1886; d Los Angeles, 1958).

American furniture designer, born in Austria. He emigrated to the USA in 1914 and worked first in New York and later in Los Angeles. His most famous work is his ‘skyscraper’ furniture, which first appeared in 1926; many pieces were maple, and inlaid with Bakelite (e.g. skyscraper bookcase, 1927; New York, Met.). Frankl later specialized in metal furniture and in Art Deco furniture decorated with black lacquers and gold and silver leaf....

(b Brussels, April 7, 1877; d Brussels, Feb 22, 1956).

Belgian interior designer and architect. He was the son of the painter Adolphe Hamesse (1849–1925) and studied architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He then worked successively in the offices of Paul Hankar and Alban Chambon. With the latter he found his true vocation in interior design using numerous ornamental components, manufactured industrially, which he excelled at combining in Art Nouveau compositions. Assisted by his two brothers, the painters Georges Hamesse (b 1874) and Léon Hamesse (b 1883), he responded to the eclectic tastes of the period by exploiting a very broad range of styles in such commissions as the Cohn-Donnay house (1904), the Ameke department store (1905), a masonic lodge (1909) and the Théâtre des Variétés (1909), all in Brussels. He also worked on a number of cinemas in Brussels, including the Artistic Palace (...

(b 1883; d 1935).

Basque–French cartoonist, interior decorator and designer, notably of furniture but also of wallpaper, textiles and jewellery. His early work is in an Art Nouveau idiom, but he gradually became a pioneering exponent of Art Deco. Pierre(-Emile) Legrain was initially his employee and later his collaborator. In 1914 Inbe moved to America, where he worked as a set designer, and in ...

[Christiaan]

(b Amsterdam, May 26, 1878; d Dachau, April 2, 1945).

Dutch painter, designer and applied artist. He trained in design and decorative painting at the Quellinus school and the Rijksschool voor Kunstnijverheid (National School of the Applied Arts) in Amsterdam from 1892 to 1899. He was assigned to assist with the decoration of the Dutch pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. A number of his designs for the pavilion were executed in batik, a Javanese technique that had been recently introduced in the Netherlands. In subsequent years Lebeau developed a very personal approach to batiking and within a short time became the leading Dutch artist in this field. His batiked screens in particular were widely acclaimed (examples in Assen, Prov. Mus. Drenthe) and are considered masterpieces of Dutch Jugendstil.

Lebeau is one of the most important representatives of the severe, geometrical trend in Dutch applied arts of the early 20th century. From 1903 he designed damask tablecloths and household linen for the ...

(b St. Andrew, Dec 29, 1902; d Sept 20, 1992).

Jamaican sculptor. He was initially self-taught, but later attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London. He worked as a furniture-carver in the 1930s for the Jamaican Art Deco furniture designer Burnett Webster (1909–1992). His own work of this period was influenced by Art Deco and by Edna Manley. Gradually it became more academic, and he became Jamaica’s most popular monumental sculptor. Among his best-known works are monuments in Kingston to Jamaica’s national heroes, including Norman Manley (1971) and Alexander Bustamante (1972), as well as to the reggae singer Bob Marley (1985). He worked in various materials, including bronze, but was at his best as a woodcarver. His outstanding achievement is the carved ceiling decoration and lectern of the university chapel, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

(b Paris, June 4, 1882; d Paris, Jan 9, 1946).

French architect and designer . He studied at the Atelier Paulin of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he obtained his diploma in 1911. His early works included several houses for wealthy clients in Paris and a pavilion for the magazine Art et décoration at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925), Paris, that revealed a taste for elegant restraint, placing him among the significant proponents of the Art Deco style in France. This was also expressed in his interior designs for the ocean liners Ile de France (1929 and 1932–3) and Normandie (1934–5). He is best remembered, however, for his work for the French railways. Under the enlightened sponsorship of Raoul Dautry, then director of French state railways, Pacon designed some low-cost housing for railway workers as well as railway carriages and locomotives. He also designed passenger terminals, for example the Gare du Maine (...

(b Tonnerre, April 23, 1879; d Rueil, May 21, 1965).

French architect, urban planner and interior decorator. He worked in Rueil briefly before founding one of the first group practices in Paris with Levard, Noël and Ardelet in 1910. He contributed several projects to the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, Paris, in 1925, including the Porte de la Concorde, and pavilions for the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres and for Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann’s Hôtel d’un Collectionneur. With their neo-classical vocabulary enhanced by Cubist-influenced sculptural reliefs, these buildings are typical of his Art Deco style; his prestigious town houses (for Ducharne, Paris, 1924 (destr.); for the Voisins, Boulogne-Billancourt, 1923 (destr.) and 1928; for the painter Alfred Lombard and his son, Boulogne-Billancourt, 1928) and blocks of flats (at the Porte de Champerret, 1928; and the Square Henri Pathé, 1928) are also characteristic. In 1926 he designed the first in a series of shops for the wine-merchants Nicolas.

Having decorated the liners ...

(b Villa d’Alme, nr Bergamo, 1867; d Milan, Feb 4, 1929).

Italian cabinetmaker and interior designer. He was born into a family of carpenters and at 14 was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in Paris; when he returned to his own country in the late 1880s he was already a highly skilled craftsman. He spent a few weeks in Milan at the studio of Carlo Bugatti, whose exotic and extravagant designs had a lasting influence on him, and after a few months Quarti had established himself in a small workshop in Via Donizetti. He became immersed in the thriving artistic life of late 19th-century Milan, encouraged by the enlightened teaching at the school of the Società Umanitaria, where design courses were based on social issues, and where he himself later taught. In 1888 Quarti met Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, a painter and enthusiastic supporter of the avant-garde, whose views on beauty and taste influenced the young designer. Quarti’s earliest works, several of which were exhibited to much acclaim at the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa in Turin in ...

(b Paris, Aug 28, 1879; d Paris, Nov 15, 1933).

French furniture designer. He was the son of a Protestant house-painter from Alsace. His early furniture, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1910, displayed the rectilinear forms and fine craftsmanship that were to characterize his style. After World War I he founded with Pierre Laurent the Etablissement Ruhlmann & Laurent which produced luxury furniture. By the mid-1920s the company had diversified into other aspects of interior decoration, including lighting, textiles, carpets (see fig.), upholstery, japanning and mirrorwork. Ruhlmann’s contribution to the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 in Paris illustrated his importance as a major exponent of the Art Deco style. He was responsible for the study in the Pavillon d’un Ambassadeur and was also represented by his own pavilion, the Hôtel d’un Collectionneur, designed by Pierre Patout, which exemplified the emerging role of the interior decorator as an ensemblier. The setting contained items by such designers as ...

(b Liège, July 27, 1858; d Liège, Nov 10, 1910).

Belgian architect and designer. He studied architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Liège from 1874. He was mainly interested in the theories of John Ruskin and William Morris, but above all in those of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, particularly those expressed in Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–72), which Serrurier-Bovy enthusiastically discussed with his fellow students. From 1882 he practised as an architect with his father, Louis Serrurier, a contractor, and built the Gothic Revival chapel (1882) at the Château de Chaityfontaine (between Liège and Verviers). Soon, however, he was devoting all his time to furniture design. In 1884 he went to London to visit the Schools of Handicrafts, Fine and Applied Arts, and to see the work of A. H. Mackmurdo and C. F. A. Voysey; he also signed agreements with Liberty’s. In the same year he married Maria Bovy, an invaluable assistant, whose name he added to his own. The Serrurier-Bovy firm opened in Liège, selling imported objects and designing unique pieces of furniture. Its first important public showing was (probably due to the intervention of Serrurier-Bovy’s friend Henry Van de Velde) at the first salon of the ...

(b Brussels, July 23, 1877; d Brussels, Sept 24, 1949).

Belgian architect and designer. He was a student of Paul Hankar, for whom he worked between 1898 and 1901, and in 1902, in collaboration with the painter and designer Adolphe Crespin (1859–1944), he showed a studio furnished and decorated in memory of Hankar at the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa in Turin. There he discovered the work of the Viennese Secession and this revelation led him to become a propagandist of its modernist style of architecture and decorative arts, which he did through his gallery L’Intérieur, later the Galerie Sneyers, in Brussels. He was commissioned by the Belgian government to organize and design several exhibitions, including the design and construction of the Belgian pavilion at the international exhibitions in Milan (1906) and Venice (1906–7), for which he deliberately borrowed from the work of Otto Wagner and Joseph Maria Olbrich. He also designed the science section at the Expositions Universelles in Liège (...

(b Bordeaux, July 14, 1875; d Paris, Aug 7, 1968).

French architect, designer and painter. He trained as an architect at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in the workshop of Victor Laloux. During the period 1903–12 he collaborated with architect and designer Paul Huillard (1875–1966), building country houses, a château in Brussels and a series of town houses and blocks of flats for artists in the Montparnasse district, of which the most noteworthy are the three contiguous town houses in the Rue Cassini. They also designed furniture. A meeting with Paul Poiret led to a commission to design the couturier’s fashion house and to subsequent commissions from other couturiers, including Mme Paquin and Jean Patou. Following a visit with Poiret to Joseph Hoffmann in Vienna, Süe formed his own design group, the Atelier Français, in Paris in 1912, modelled on the Wiener Werkstätte, which aimed at the concept of complete design, from the building itself down to the cutlery. This was followed by the ...

(b Vienna, 1872; d New York, July 10, 1933).

American architect, stage designer, interior designer and illustrator of Austrian birth. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna under Karl Hasenauer. Urban first received recognition as an architect in the USA in 1904 when his design for the interior of the Austrian Pavilion at the World’s Fair in St Louis, MO, was awarded a Gold Medal. He subsequently established himself in Europe as a stage designer; in 1911 he emigrated to the USA to assume a position as set designer with the Boston Opera Company.

After the completion of the Ziegfield Theater (1922), New York, Urban solidified his reputation as an architect with unexecuted proposals for several large theatres. For the Metropolitan Opera House, intended as the focal point of the first schemes for the Rockefeller Center (1926–8), he proposed a semi-circular seating arrangement, to which he added galleries that projected from the proscenium into the seating area to break down the separation between audience and stage. In ...