Glitz, glamour and Gatsby? Not quite. Here’s why the Art Deco movement is darker than you think

The Art Deco movement first dazzled the world in the 1920s and 1930s.

It remains one of the most glamorous architectural styles in history, instantly recognisable in landmarks like New York’s Chrysler Building, constructed in 1928. It evokes images of glittering skyscrapers trimmed with chrome, cinemas fronted by ziggurat steps and mansion parties as seen in the likes of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (and indeed, thrown by the author himself).

Though it’s often used as a shorthand to refer to any of the above, Art Deco was never a single unified style. It was an art movement that drew from a blend of influences from around the globe, borrowing imagery from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, and – most strikingly – from the great temples of the Maya and Aztec world. These forms were reimagined through a western lens. What looked like modern chic to contemporaries was in fact a patchwork of exoticised antiquity.

It’s because of that vast scope of influence that Art Deco is so complex. “It really is quite a tricky thing to define, because it’s so broad,” says historian Emma Bastin, speaking about the origins and influence of the movement on the HistoryExtra podcast.

So how did this glittering style emerge, what ancient traditions did it draw on, and why might its legacy be fraught today?

Defining Art Deco

Although slippery to pin down, Art Deco has a clear timeframe.

“Art Deco was a movement that we associate with the interwar period,” Bastin explains. “We see its very early origins prior to the First World War, then everything slowed down, obviously because of the war. And then after the war there was a big shift in mood.

“By the 1930s people say Art Deco was really reaching its peak and the height of its sophistication. But the Second World War brought it to a crashing close, for very obvious reasons.”

The movement arose from trauma and change. After the devastation of the First World War, societies were looking for something new and progressive. The ornate details of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras felt outdated. Deco stripped that away, replacing curls and clutter with sleek, geometric forms.

“It looked very different to art movements that had gone before,” Bastin notes. “For example, in the Victorian Edwardian period, things were very fussy, and very detailed. Art Deco moves away from that. It went for very bold geometric shapes, lots of strong motifs. Bold colour was very important, and the materials that were used were often manmade and designed to look luxurious.”

The movement was also unapologetically modern. “The biggest thing that differentiates Art Deco from what has come before, I think, is the fact that it embraced commerce and business and industrialisation. This was a movement that wanted art to be available to the masses and not locked up in an ivory tower,” says Bastin.

Department stores, cinemas, railway stations and factories all became viable canvases for Deco design.

Egyptomania and Tutankhamun’s tomb

But for all that it looked forward, Art Deco found its inspiration firmly within the past. Archaeological discoveries provided some of its richest inspiration, and none more dramatically than the 1922 excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb by the British archaeologist Howard Carter.

“When this was uncovered, it was a phenomenal thing and it sparked this Egypt-mania; Tut-mania,” Bastin explains.

For more than a century, Europeans had been fascinated by ancient Egypt, ever since Napoleon’s 1798 campaign brought back images of the pyramids and temples. But Carter’s discovery, a glittering gold tomb, was unlike anything before. Newspapers splashed its treasures across front pages, and Egyptian imagery entered mass culture.

“What Art Deco took from Egyptian archaeology was the luxurious materials and the hieroglyphic-style geometric motifs that were in there,” Bastin says.

The lotus flower, the winged scarab and the sphinx all became fashionable motifs. Jewellery glittered with pharaonic imagery, cinemas took on the forms of temples, and textiles reproduced Egyptian patterns in bold Deco palettes. Egyptian antiquity, filtered through Carter’s discovery, became a defining strand of the Deco look.

Borrowing from Greece and Rome

Egypt was only one piece of the puzzle. Designers also drew on Greece and Rome, long regarded in Europe as the foundation of ‘classical’ civilisation. “We also had classical Greek and Roman influences coming through, and part of this was because the architecture is fairly mathematical and linear, and it’s very pleasing to the eye,” Bastin explains.

“It’s got a lot of symmetry and linearity, but there were also myths coming through from the Greek and Roman cultures in the form of sculptures: very modern renderings of the ancient myths.”

Deco architects stripped the columns, arches and pediments of antiquity down to geometric essentials. Mythological figures were stylised into angular reliefs or streamlined bronzes.

America’s search for its own antiquity

Across the Atlantic, another current was at work. The United States, still culturally overshadowed by the long history of Europe, wanted an antiquity of its own. “If we look to America in particular, we then get Mexican, Aztec, Inca influences coming through,” Bastin explains.

“They have this wish to have their own ancient past as well, they’re fed up of taking European influences, with the Greeks and the Romans. So the fact that with the Mesoamerican motifs, they’ve got their own ancient past that they can take from is fascinating to them.”

So American architects seized on Mesoamerican imagery with great enthusiasm. The stepped pyramids of the Maya and Aztec world translated perfectly into the skyscrapers mandated by New York’s 1916 zoning law, which required tall buildings to taper as they rose.

Movie palaces and civic buildings incorporated jagged triangles, ziggurat steps and stylised serpent motifs. These forms gave American cities a distinctive Deco look, one rooted, however superficially, in the pre-Columbian past of the Americas.

A “hodgepodge” of exoticism

But as much as Art Deco dazzled with eclecticism, it was also careless with cultural meaning in a way that might raise modern eyebrows.

Few western designers of the 1920s and 1930s had more than a superficial grasp of the ancient societies they borrowed from. Archaeological knowledge of Mesoamerica, for instance, was still in its infancy, often filtered through explorers’ sketches and museum displays rather than systematic study. Egyptian imagery was reduced to lotus blossoms and scarabs, while African designs were flattened into geometric patterns stripped of cultural context.

“Because it’s not particularly well understood at the time, what they pull out tends to be a complete hodgepodge,” Bastin says.

Cinemas in particular became riotous showcases of this mishmash. An American movie palace might feature an Egyptian-style facade decorated with winged suns, step inside to reveal Inca zigzags along the balconies, and then finish with a ceiling of stylised Greek meanders. In Paris or London, department stores combined Mayan step motifs with Assyrian-inspired winged figures. The end result was a kaleidoscope of motifs stitched together for decorative impact and looked at with today’s concerns of appropriation or misrepresentation, ignorant of cultural context.

This practice reflected the colonial attitudes of the interwar era. Accuracy mattered much less than atmosphere, with ancient motifs becoming shorthand for sophistication and glamour.

But the result was that complex cultural influences were flattened into aesthetic tokens, merged to suit western tastes. An Aztec serpent god might appear next to a sphinx or a Greek key pattern, not because the cultures had any connection, but because they just looked striking together.

It was precisely this eclecticism that gave Art Deco its fantastical quality. It crafted images of imagined antiquity, albeit built with a disregard for any authenticity, taking inspiration from Tutankhamun’s tomb, Mayan temples and Roman myths simultaneously.

Yet, as Bastin reflects, that same quality gives the movement a complicated legacy today. “I don’t know whether today it would be politically correct to take all of these [visual motifs] and just shove them together, but they did,” she says.

What once seemed like an embrace of the ancient world can now read as an effect of a colonial attitude: a selective borrowing of global cultures for aesthetic effect, with little concern for meaning or origin.

Emma Bastin was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.