Arts Decoratifs

Being of a revisionist turn of thought, I never quite know where to put the tearoom futurism of art deco into the partly reconstructed notion of Modernism that I'm currently (whisper it) writing a short book about. As a term, art deco derives itself from one of the most aesthetically and politically contested of the Great Exhibitions, the Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts in 1925. Here you had a dominant cubistified classicism, deeply related to the 'return to order' of the Paris avant-garde, and lurking around amidst it were pavilions by Konstantin Melnikov and Le Corbusier that, from the off, made quite clear their oppostion to this sort of backsliding. Art deco stems from the French/American/English take up of the updated classicism, maybe with a dash of the glammed-up Modernism of Mallet-Stevens, somewhere between the two. Yet, whenever I come across an art deco building, I tend to quite unambiguously like them, whether the bloated, Mussolini style of Shell-Mex House or the streamlined, Modernistic versions that became more dominant in the 30s: some are even among my very favourite things.



And best of all, there's the cinemas - those magnificent high street fantasias dotted around everywhere from Swansea to Morecambe, usually converted into bingo halls or, in London, evangelical churches. If, in Alan Colquhoun's definition, Modernism is the combination of 'the machine aesthetic and a new conception of space', then much of this stuff is Pulp Modernist, undoubtedly: Erich Mendelsohn bastardised, dressed up in faience and neon and taken on the razzle in Margate. Appropriately, the first 'Moderne' cinema in Britain was at the Dreamland in the aforementioned, unloved seaside town. Pevsner called this sort of stuff 'mondernistic' or 'jazz modern', somewhat derisively (the latter sounds rather fun), and pomo has always loved to draw on the period, usually to truly horrible effect: yet, in Oskar Deutsch's palaces of escapism there's almost everything one wants in Modernism: disjunction, excitement, standardisation, all employed in the activity that some historians claim helped avert revolution during the great depression...