Art Deco

hello i'm laurence llewelyn bowen um he's look down life feeling a little bit drab if it is why don't you join me because I'm about to go for a stroll through the history the culture and the alchemy of interior design this is Lawrence's school of flock [Music] this information majors if that is your ever facing a mob of angry east seats wielding chair legs with menace and who are demanding you tell them the difference between art deco and art nouveau or you die actually it's perfectly simple just think about the word de ce o-- deco it's sleek it's tailored it's chic and it's oh so geo glamorous they have it if it's largely straight lines with a sprinkle of elegant geometry thrown in it's deco whereas art nouveau decos curvaceous predecessor is all soft sibilant voluptuous shapes kocchi alien hips or beasting lips Nouveau was the go-to style of the naughty 90s and encapsulated that decades obsession with groan looks living and decadent sexuality but by the 1910s it was running a nasty literally becoming less lousy less new magic less filled with pink perfumed air less subsist with frippery an excessive accessorise ation at that time in vienna the artist Klimt who actually started as a goldsmith - do you know that and all of his architect and designer buddies brought a new tautness to the style but wisely they kept its luck see good looks decidedly and expensively high fat so the first world war i mean well obviously that put aesthetics on furlough and then when hostilities ended and pleasantries resumed fashion forward design had a new graphic edge to it and it daringly teamed it with some of that smashed up avocado art which that naughty little Spanish in Picasso had started meddling with the link with cubism the link with jazz with cocktails with short hair for ladies and long eyelashes for gentlemen tantor art this newest of New World Order's inhabited by the very bright young things who despised and derided the older generation that had led it so disastrously to war it was in many ways a style designed to shock the wrinklies and flip a beautifully manicured finger at the old world order it also hit a hungry planet newly prosperous but starved of style at the very moment that magazines like Vogue went international and just as Hollywood started its sparkle deco quickly became international now at its heart decos biggest influence is neoclassicism proportion balance serenity and all of those straight lines create a reliably stylish bone structure well for anything anything architects and designers wanted to apply to its shiny surface literally gilding the lily now until 1925 Deco was nameless but following the exposición days our decorative in Paris Dec stuck it's the perfect hipper than hip brand name for this thoroughly modern style and by 1925 Dec L had got itself very very good at being itself and it started to absorb digests and ultimately regurgitate stylish accessories from all over time and space Xinhua Zuri's exotic excesses the decadent graphic lines of Japan brutal tribal forms from Africa pree Colombia's masse monumental ISM and then there was Egypt ah Egypt after they lifted the lid on King Tut Decco crush friend owed with lotus flowers with ibises with turquoise with gold and with lapis lazuli but in tandem with all of this fancy schmancy dressing-up box over-excitement deco quickly absorbed a lot of the practical star solutions that industrial designers were evolving to make boats and cars and planes travel faster and smoother in fact the look of speed evolved hand and green suede glove with art deco an art deco is debt to go faster shapes got more and more obvious even the ultimate in immobility a giant skyscraper became kinetic Restless with edges corners and planes bent back on themselves as if the g-force of speed elegantly distorted their outlines think about it 30 years before spaceships the urban skyline of the 1920s looked like a skyrocket car pop modernity and the modern they were both passionately embraced so new materials like aluminium bakelite plastic they all ended up right next to rich and exotic traditional veneers mother-of-pearl sharkskin evany ivory crystal whilst neon defined decades characteristic shapes with unmissable graphic clarity at night but nothing looks more old-fashioned than the modern when it's past its display until date and the fiery economic Cataclysm of the 1929 Wall Street Crash immolated the super luxurious surface of Art Deco revealing the monochromatic linear skeleton beneath deco in the 30s is a much simpler affair a penitent hangover style nursing the booze blues and a lot of regret at its own overindulgence normally called modern rather than deco it's when less is more becomes the chorus and mass production the refrain no more fountains or gazelles no more inlaid mirrored boram's or evolving glass dance floors instead mechanical geometry chrome acetate and brilliant white paint deco the icon style for Grand Hotel's four-ton apartments extravagantly exotic cinematic palaces for Hollywood Follies and super luxury liners well it becomes modern if not modernist a much more democratic aesthetic inexorably linked with socialism and the burgeoning might of communism peppering the world's suburbs with toothpaste white concrete apartment blocks whose Krita windows blinker soapy greeting and whose cantilevered curved balconies offer somewhere to park a bike after long and tedious day the munitions factory [Music] yeah ended her life [Music]

Channel: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's School of Flock

Views: 17,883

Keywords: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, LLB

Id: znTOm-AzT6g

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020