Art Deco Designers
Just before Art Deco made its big arrival, artists of the Beaux-Arts, Art Nouveau, and the Arts and Crafts movement paved the way. The Arts and Crafts Movement was led by William Morris of England who disliked the inferior quality of the machine made furnishings of the time. Morris valued the importance of handcrafted items like pottery, embroidery, and painted tiles. He also valued excellence in furniture design, craftsmanship and high quality materials.
Morris' American counterpart was Gustav Stickley who is credited for his mission-style furniture. Stickley used sturdy oak to create the handcrafted, unpainted, ungilded pieces of the Craftsman label between 1898 and 1915.
Frank Lloyd Wright was influenced by the simplicity insisted upon by Morris and Stickley and the Arts and Crafts movement. Wright stressed the use of sturdy wood and rectilinear patterns in his architecture and furniture designs. However, he was not opposed to the use of machines to help create his pieces, as did Morris and Stickley. In this way, Wright made room for the Art Deco designers of the twentieth century.
The French are credited for the emergence of Art Deco through the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Interior and furniture designs by Emile Jacques Ruhlmann and Jean Dunand are famous among Art Deco historians for their contribution to the Moderne Art.
However, designers like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe proved Germans also had a strong influence. In 1930, Mies met Philip Johnson, the head of the architecture division of the Museum of Modern Art. Johnson persuaded Mies to design the interior of his Manhattan apartment in the Art Deco style. Mies was able to showcase the Barcelona chair with its elegant chrome plated crossing legs and fine leather cushions. This chair had been created for the German Pavilion (or Barcelona Pavilion) just a year before and shown at the International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain and proves to be a classic example of Art Deco styling.
Marcel Breuer also created a classic Art Deco chair. A simple armchair, its chromium-plated tubular steel frame had a canvas seat and back and a cantilever frame. This frame incorporated a joist beam that projected out to support weight and eliminates the need for back legs. Both Mies and Breuer taught at the Bauhaus design school in Germany before it closed in 1932.
Another important Art Deco designer was Donald Deskey. Although he was known for his work in fashionable department store display windows and upscale Manhattan apartments, his biggest success was creating the interior design of Radio City Music Hall in New York. Deskey created a sophisticated Art Deco interior where he used highly polished metals and tubular fixtures along with commissioned murals and sculptures to create the Moderne look.
The designers of the Art Deco era are credited for their work in creating a distinctive and unique style in furniture and interior design. Their innovative décor is still very popular in the interior designs of today.
