September/October 08
Artbank: Celebrating 25 Years of Australian Art (SA) > SA
Artbank is the largest buyer of contemporary Australian art in the country. Read More
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green: War (NSW) > NSW
Being assigned the role of an official war artist must be a pretty big ask at any point in time. Read More
Point of View: Eugene Carchesio Explores the Collection (QLD) > QLD
With a career spanning more than 25 years, Brisbane artist Eugene Carchesio has established himself as one of Australia’s most fascinating and thought provoking contemporary artists. Read More
Thousands of Masterpieces
The means by which art is valued, by the dollar, has always seemed to me simultaneously an arbitrary and endlessly fascinating subject. Read More
Two Adventures in Three Dimensions (VIC) > VIC
Given their black gums and yellow bums, “loveable” is possibly not the word that immediately springs to mind when confronted with Julia Robinson’s goats. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC)
By Megan Backhouse
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all.
The style was a global phenomenon that left no field of artistic endeavour unscathed. And here we’ve got the jewellery, the hotel foyer, the car, not to mention the textiles, clothing and Hollywood films to prove it. For the fifth installment of its Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series, the NGV is putting on a new version of an exhibition mounted – to rave reviews – at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum five years ago.
As V&A curator Ghislaine Woods puts it “the sheer plurality of Art Deco has made it hard to pin down” but the NGV (and the V&A before it) has given it a whirl by assembling more than 300 works across all fields touched by the Deco bug.
“It was the style of the flapper girl and the factories of Fordism, the luxury ocean liner and the skyscraper, the fantasy world of Hollywood and the real world of the Harlem Renaissance,” writes Woods in her introduction to the NGV catalogue. “It could be deeply nationalistic and yet it spread like wild fire all over the world, dominating the skylines of cities from New York to Shanghai and sheathing offices and factories from London to Rio.”
Australia too felt the pull of Deco, and its sway can still be seen in everything from public buildings to posters to household ceramics of the time. So, alongside overseas works like photographs of skyscrapers, New York furnishing fabrics, French travel posters, Lalique glassware, Cartier gems and Chanel clothing, we get a taste of what the catalogue calls “Deco Down Under”.
Cassandre, Ukraine 1901–68, emigrated to France 1915
The North Express (Nord Express), poster 1927, colour
lithograph, 105.4 x 75.0 cm (image). Victoria and Albert Museum, London© V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London © Cassandre, courtesy of Roland Mouron
Burnham Beeches, the ambitious Deco mansion built in Sherbrooke in 1933 for 'Aspro king' Alfred Nicholas, plainly couldn’t be slotted in itself but we get to see a 1947 photograph of the spread, all curved reinforced concrete and multi-level patios.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge, which opened in 1932, is also featured here in a dramatic 1933 photograph by Harold Cazneaux, who played up the lacy lattice work and graphic shadows. And then there’s Napier Waller whose first mosaic commission in Melbourne combined images of modern life with Classical figures over the façade of Collins Street’s Newspaper House. Here he is represented with a painted study for that mural, still considered one of the clearest expressions of Art Deco in his public work.
Moving indoors now, and shifting to a smaller scale, we get a sample of the domestic ceramics produced in Australia during the early 20th Century. While NGV Senior Curator of Australian Art, Kirsty Grant, says most of the jugs, vases and other functional vessels produced in Australia during the 1930s represented a “somewhat watered down”
version of the Deco style, the Bakewell Brothers did come up with the particularly striking Pontiac tea set. That particular teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl echo the flamboyant form of General Motors’ Pontiac car and are included in the exhibition, as is the apple-green Bakelite radio manufactured by AWA in 1936 in the shape of the Empire State Building.
While most of the Australian works featured in Art Deco 1910-1939 stem from the 1930s, the biggest single event on the Art Deco calendar was the 1925 Exposition in Paris. The rules of the display were that only “modern art and design” be shown, which led to the exhibition of hundreds of Deco works from around the world (though the French are said to have dominated) visited by more than 16 million people. There were enormous Lalique fountains, national pavilions filled with diverse takes on Deco from everyone from the Dutch to the Japanese to the Chinese, and specially created Deco window displays in all the small shops and big department stores. It was this whole extravaganza that established Art Deco as the then most fashionable of modern styles and influenced a generation of designers (and consumers).
Woods suggests that the exposition’s greatest legacy was not educative so much as the promotion of the “fusion of Art Deco with shopping” and that Art Deco was a style that “addressed the individualism of desire”. And, perhaps, that still holds true, explaining the record crowds that filed through the V&A when this exhibition was first put on in 2003 and the high numbers anticipated for its Melbourne airing.
AWA, Sydney (manufacturer), Australia 1913–Empire State,
Fisk radiolette and cigarette box 1936, bakelite, glass, metal,
28.5 x 28.5 x 18.0 cm. Private collection.
Sydney © Peter Sheridan
National Gallery of Victoria 28 June to 5 October
Megan Backhouse is a Melbourne-based journalist who has been writing about the visual arts for more than 10 years.
