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32 Art Deco 1910~ 1939 The Sunday age 2008

Visual Arts Megan Backhouse Small slice of heaven

The deco heyday produced — is the painterly face of art deco. a string of affairs and, ever conscious produced similar imagery in her Her The telephone II is one of Art Deco of her public persona, often had fashion and textile designs and is some stunning images 1910-1939’s signature works and, as herself photographed in the guise of noteworthy when it comes to the such, is in the opening room of the Hollywood movie stars. breadth of all that is deco in that among the material goods. exhibition, along with an American- Perhaps that explains the roll call she found there to be “no gap” made aluminium meat slicer, a of celebrities who have since lavished between her painting and decorative French oak dressing table with ivory grand sums on De Lempicka works, work. Although she initially took (Below) The elephone pressed and silvered bronze inlay, and other from fashion designers Wolfgang up the applied arts to supplement m ay p o l e (Em p i re to one ear, she is all works thought to epitomise the style. Joop (who owns The telephone II) and her income as a painter, Delaunay, State building), glossy curls, sultry But of the more than 300 works Donna Karan, to Jack Nicholson and who died in 1979, once said, “The 1932, eyes and painted lips. included in the NGV’s exhibition, Barry Humphries. Madonna, much to minor art had never been an artistic gelatin silver T Tamara De Lempicka there are only nine paintings, 12 the annoyance of the artist’s daughter, frustration but a free expansion, a photograph; didn’t do ragamuffin. But as her photographs, plus about 50 prints and used De Lempicka paintings in a conquest of new space. It was an Ed w a r d telephone painting shows, she did do drawings, many of which are posters. couple of videos. application of the same research.” STEICHEN, US, the statuesque, the lavishly dressed, Just as the visual arts don’t make up Art Deco 1910-1939 also features Although French artist Fernand 1879-1973. the perfectly proportioned. the biggest slice here, they didn’t Ukrainian-French painter and Leger didn’t turn to the decorative

National Gallery of Now, almost 30 years after her pack a massive punch at the 1925 designer Sonia Delaunay, who, with arts in the same way as Delaunay, Victoria, Melbourne, death, the Polish-born artist — who Exposition in Paris either, which was husband Robert and others, founded one of his 1918 abstracts, exuding Purchased 1973. famously thought modernism untidy more about decorative objects that the Orphic cubism art movement. She his preoccupation with geometrics and impressionism dirty-coloured could be bought than high art. is represented by a 1913 watercolour and machine-age aesthetics, is also Deco proved to be something of illustration bursting with all her included here. Leger’s emphasis on a challenge to what had been seen as signature shapes and colours. She cylindrical shapes — “tubism”, as the primacy of painting; Victoria and it has come to be called — has been Albert Museum curator Ghislaine seen in De Lempicka’s paintings. Wood cites one of the greatest legacies But his role in this exhibition is to do of 1925 Paris as being “the fusion of with what the V&A’s Ghislaine Wood art deco with shopping”. describes in the exhibition catalogue Even so, the movement towards as the way “geometry represented a geometry and abstraction in the visual distillation of the modern world” for arts was quickly assimilated into the contemporary artists and designers deco style and, by the same token, alike. artists working everywhere from This “distillation” can also be Paris and New York to Shanghai and seen in Hungarian sculptor Joseph Sydney were strongly influenced by Csaky’s 1919 Abstract Sculpture, a all that was glamorous, luxurious and bronze column of cones, cylinders, exotic about it. discs and spheres; and in another of French artist Jean Dupas was one the paintings in this exhibition, the such artist, and one of his best-known 1916 Acrobats, by French cubist Albert paintings, Les Perruches (Parakeets), Gleizes. He was living in New York was shown at the Paris Exposition and at the time and was affected by the is here too. city’s skyscrapers, as was American For De Lempicka, though, the deco photographer Edward Steichen. pull seems to have been more all- Steichen was noted for capturing encompassing. The heady influences city scenes from the window of and aspirations of the time didn’t Napier Waller, Australia, 1893-1972; his Manhattan studio, but here is feed into her paintings alone, and I’ll put a girdle round the earth represented by a 1932 picture of the the decidedly deco twists and turns (detail), Car toon for Newspaper Empire State Building. of her complicated private life have House m o s a i c, 1933, National Gallery Buildings also influenced become the stuff of legend. From her of Australia, Canberra. stylish duplex in Paris she conducted © Courtesy of the Napier Waller estate C ontinued Page 34 Back to Art Deco Multimedia: http://www.theage.com.au/multimedia/art_deco

34 Art Deco 1910~ 1939 The Sunday age 2008

Arch of steel, 1933; Harold Cazneaux, NZ, 1878-1953; gelatin silver photograph.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

F rom Page 32 textile artist Ruth Reeves, whose 1930 Manhattan furnishing fabric juxtaposes architectural motifs of New York with the geometric grid of the place and billowing factory smoke. The New York skyline makes another appearance in a lithographic advertisement poster designed by Horace C. Taylor, and there are several other posters in this show. Many are devoted to tourism and travel (“escape”, as long as it was done in style, being something of a deco aspiration). There’s a poster from 1935 promoting the Normandie, at the time the world’s largest, most luxurious and fastest ocean-liner, its interior a marvel of deco design. A couple of years later, Victorian Railways took a similar approach in promoting its new train, the Spirit of Progress, portraying it as one long, gleaming line of aerodynamic carriages. French poster designer Paul Colin depicted American entertainer Josephine Baker in a banana skirt in a 1927 lithograph. Three years later, English artist Cecil Beaton photographed his sister, Nancy, as a shooting star by having her sit amid a mass of crumpled cellophane. Australia’s Olive Cotton took a less fantastical approach and is included here with a 1935 photograph that is neither opulent nor exotic. Her Teacup Ballet takes a series of everyday domestic cups and quietly plays up their geometric patterns and abstract shapes. Similarly, New Zealand-born photographer Harold Cazneaux dwelled on the shadowy mathematical precision and symmetry of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in his 1933 photograph featured here. Victorian artist Napier Waller is represented in the show by the painted study for his first mosaic commission in Melbourne, the 1933 facade of Newspaper House, at 247 Collins Street. The work combined images of modern life with classical figures and is one of the best examples of deco in his public work. But without a doubt one of the clearest expressions of the painterly in art deco is the work of De Lempicka. But for all her devotees and her signature status in this show, she is not without her critics. A 2004 exhibition devoted to her at London’s Royal Academy of Arts had one reviewer describing her pictures as having “no soul, no sincerity, no imagination and few appreciable differences one from the other”. Another reported that the kindest thing that could be said about De Lempicka’s art was that “it was of its day”. But perhaps this is the point, when it comes to this exhibition: this being a slice of the visual arts in the midst of the global phenomenon that was art deco. M egan Back house is a contributing arts reporter.