Art Deco Complete

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Art Deco Complete: The Definitive Guide to the Decorative Arts of the 1920s and 1930s

By Alastair Duncan
Thames & Hudson, £50

FT Bookshop price: £40

It is for its iconic architecture that the art deco movement is perhaps best-known – New York’s Chrysler building, for instance – but in this book Duncan eschews the monuments and turns to the minutiae: book-binding, brooches, tableware.

What emerges from his exhaustive survey of the era’s decorative arts is a picture of art deco’s astonishing diversity and richness; Art Deco Complete documents everything from ornate, hand-crafted jewellery boxes to futuristic, mass-produced table-lamps.

As Duncan makes clear in his introduction, this diversity makes art deco a difficult movement to pin down and define. It evinced both a modern sensibility and a lingering attachment to the organic, stylised motifs of art nouveau; it encompassed both the decorative flourishes of Parisian art de luxe and functional designs that anticipated the modernism of Le Corbusier et al; it drew on an unlikely range of influences, from the ancient past to the imagined future, from wild beasts to sleek machines, from west Africa to the Far East.

Such variety is significant, in that it can be seen to reflect the restless mood of the time. As Duncan puts it, art deco resulted from “a sense of liberation” in the post-war period, when people were “avidly in search of the adventurous, the daring, the new.”

Categorised by medium, and complete with an A-Z listing of the movement’s representative designers, the book will act as a comprehensive reference work for specialists. But this sumptuously illustrated volume will also be of more general interest, as a portrait of a fascinating era, in all its colour and glamour.