Zemni Design

Design Explorations by Linda Mayoux

Art Deco

Tag: France

  • Art Deco

    Art Deco

    Art Deco Google Images

    Art Deco, or Deco, first appeared in France after World War I and flourished internationally in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Deco emerged from the interwar rapid industrialisation, embracing technology. The style is often characterized by rich colours, bold geometric shapes and lavish ornamentation, combining traditional craft motifs with Machine Age imagery and materials. During its heyday, Art Deco represented luxury, glamour, exuberance and faith in social and technological progress. Its popularity waned after World War II. 

     Origins

    Some historians trace Deco’s roots to the Universal Exposition of 1900.After this show a group of artists established an informal collective known as La Société des artistes décorateurs (Society of Decorator Artists) to promote French crafts. Among them were Hector Guimard, Eugène Grasset, Raoul Lachenal, Paul Bellot, Maurice Dufrêne and Emile Decoeur. These artists are said to have influenced the principles of Art Deco.

    In 1905, before the onset of Cubism, Eugène Grasset wrote and published Méthode de Composition Ornementale, Éléments Rectilignes, within which he systematically explored the decorative (ornamental) aspects of geometric elements, forms, motifs and their variations, in contrast with (and as a departure from) the undulating Art Nouveau style of Hector Guimard, so popular in Paris a few years earlier. Grasset stresses the principle that various simple geometric shapes like triangles and squares are the basis of all compositional arrangements.

    The first use of the term Art Deco has been attributed to architect Le Corbusier, who penned a series of articles in his journal L’Esprit nouveau under the headline “1925 Expo: Arts Déco”. He was referring to the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) organized to showcase new ideas in applied artist. But the style had been in full force in France for several years before that date.

    Deco was heavily influenced by pre-modern art from around the world and observable at the Musée du Louvre, Musée de l’Homme and the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. During the 1920s, affordable travel permitted in situ exposure to other cultures. There was also popular interest in archeology due to excavations at Pompeii,Troy, the tomb of Tutankhamun, etc. Artists and designers integrated motifs from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Asia, Mesoamerica and Oceania with Machine Age elements.

    Deco was also influenced by Cubism, Constructivism, Functionalism, Modernism, and Futurism.

    The term came into more general use in 1966, when a French exhibition celebrating the 1925 event was held under the title Les Années 25: Art Déco/Bauhaus/Stijl/Esprit Nouveau. Here the term was used to distinguish the new styles of French decorative crafts that had emerged since the Belle Epoque.The term Art Deco has since been applied to a wide variety of works produced during the Interwar period (L’Entre Deux Guerres), and even to those of the Bauhaus in Germany. However, Art Deco originated in France. It has been argued that the term should be applied to French works and those produced in countries directly influenced by France.

    Attributes

    Bevis Hillier defined Art Deco as “an assertively modern style [that] ran to symmetry rather than asymmetry, and to the rectilinear rather than the curvilinear; it responded to the demands of the machine and of new material [and] the requirements of mass production”. 1968 Art Deco of the ’20s and ’30s.

    Deco emphasizes geometric forms: spheres, polygons, rectangles, trapezoids, zigzags, chevrons, and sunburst motifs. Elements are often arranged in symmetrical patterns. Modern materials such as aluminum, stainless steel, Bakelite, chrome, and plastics are frequently used. Stained glass, inlays, and lacquer are also common. Colors tend to be vivid and high contrast.

    Uses

    Art Deco was a globally popular style and affected many areas of design. It was used widely in consumer products such as automobiles, furniture, cookware, china, textiles, jewelry, clocks, and electronic items such as radios, telephones, and jukeboxes. It also influenced architecture, interior design, industrial design, fashion, graphic arts, and cinema.

    During the 1930s, Art Deco was used extensively for public works projects, railway stations, ocean liners (including the Île de France, Queen Mary, andNormandie), movie palaces, and amusement parks.

    The austerities imposed by World War II caused Art Deco to decline in popularity: it was perceived by some as gaudy and inappropriately luxurious.A resurgence of interest began during the 1960s. Deco continues to inspire designers and is often used in contemporary fashion, jewelry, and toiletries.

    A style related to Art Deco is Streamline Moderne (or Streamline) which emerged during the mid-1930s. Streamline was influenced by modern aerodynamic principles developed for aviation and ballistics to reduce air friction at high velocities. Designers applied these principles to cars (eg Chrysler Airflow of 1933), trains, ships, and even objects not intended to move, such as refrigerators, gas pumps, and buildings.

  • Robert Massin

    Robert Massin is a French graphic designer, art director and typographer who is notable for his innovative experimentation with expressive forms of typographic composition. Massin stopped using his first name in the 1950s.

    Google images



    Work

    Notable books designed by Massin:

    • Exercices de style, by Raymond Queneau, Gallimard, 1963. A book of 99 retellings of the same story, each presented different graphically.
    • La Cantatrice chauve, by Eugène Ionesco, Gallimard, 1964. (translated asThe Bald Prima Donna or The Bald Soprano). The book presented the dialogue of a single play through hundreds of pages of innovative graphic compositions. Different characters took on different typefaces. He used mixtures of typefaces and new compositional methods to present dialogue, he also formally manipulated dialogue by stretching and bending. He used black pages to capture silence on stage.
    • Délire à deux, by Eugène Ionesco, Gallimard, 1966.
    • Conversation-sinfonietta, by Jean Tardieu, Gallimard, 1966.
    • Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel, by Jean Cocteau, Hoëbeke, begun in 1966 and published in 1994.

    Notable books written by Massin:

    La Lettre et l’Image, Gallimard, 1970.

    Biography

    (Wikipedia)

    Massin was born in 1925 in Bourdinière-Saint-Loup, a commune in the Eure-et-Loir department in north-central France. He began working as a designer following World War II. Massin’s immediate influence in the 1950s was innovative French book designer Pierre Faucheux. Faucheux emphasized the idea that each new book should be a new object determined by type choice, proportion and déroulement, the development of a visual concept over several pages. Faucheux also emphasized the idea that the choice of typeface should have some relationship to the meaning of the text. These ideas are apparent in much of Massin’s most famous work. For over twenty years Massin acted as art director of Éditions Gallimard, one of the leading French publishers of books.

    Writing in Eye magazine in a review of a book on Massin, Jan Middendorp credited La Cantatrice and La Lettre et l’Image as follows: “These two masterpieces of typographic eccentricity became hot items among designers and art directors on both sides of the Atlantic, and were especially influential in America, where they helped trigger the post-functionalist approach of graphic design that eventually culminated in the eclecticism of the late 1980s and 1990s.”

    A 2007 major monograph of his work, Massin, written by Laetitia Wolff and published by Phaidon, was the first Massin monograph to appear in English.