The point about art deco is that it was the first mass-production design style. The best-known English ceramicist in the Victoria and Albert's lavish art deco exhibition is Clarice Cliff. She wasn't a craft potter. She designed her cups and teapots in bright oranges and greens for a Stoke-on-Trent factory, which sold them in department stores. Vast numbers were manufactured. As fashions changed, vast numbers were thrown away. Those that remain fetch increasing prices.
The identical life cycle, from ornament to dustbin, befell all those bronze, bare-breasted girls, hair blowing in the wind, hands grasping at greyhounds, on hundreds of thousands of suburban mantelpieces. Where are they now? The front-door stained glass of these same semis often displayed another great art deco totem: the sunburst. The sun's disc shot out into optimistic but oddly geometric rays. This was more durable. Walking the avenues and crescents of outer London, you can still see some of these glitchy fossils from the first great age of mass consumption.
At the V&A show, you are surrounded by work from the 1920s and 1930s which was mostly despised by the cultural elites of the day: streamlined cars, Capone-style; high-street cinema foyers, Odeon-style; Hollywood dreamland musicals, Astaire-style. The glittery Chrysler building may now be the best-loved New York skyscraper, but for years it was mocked as commercialist kitsch. The label "art deco" derives from a 1925 Paris international exhibition of arts d?coratifs et industriels. But New York, Los Angeles and Miami beach are the world capitals of the style. It's no accident, as Marxists once said, that 1925 was also when Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby's bootlegger mansion was surely art deco chrome, glass, bakelite and gilt from end to end.
Was the elitist scorn an early example of anti-Americanism? Mass consumption, powered from America, was a subversive form of egalitarianism. Everyone saw the same talkie or bought the same Hoover, just as later they all drank the same Coke or ate the same hamburger.
Art deco was preoccupied with surface, not depth; with speed, not direction. Politically-an issue the V&A dodges-it lent itself easily to fascism, and especially Nazism. This was partly due to the Nazi leaders' obsession with cinema. The spotlights criss-crossing above the Nuremberg rallies, the flaccid, party-approved sculptures of Arno Breker, Albert Speer's cinematic designs for a new Berlin, even the SS double-flash insignia and the swirling swastika flags: all these were pure, or rather impure, art deco. Nor was it only Goebbels who loved Hollywood imagery. Stalin's Moscow Metro, built by slave labour, has been compared, by Eric Hobsbawm, to the west's great art deco movie palaces, mostly built by Jewish entrepreneurs. Both, he said, gave "men and women who had no access to individual luxury the experience that, for a collective moment, it was theirs."
The V&A has reassembled the glittery foyer of the Strand Palace Hotel, designed by Oliver Bernard (father of the late Jeffrey) in 1930, and stripped out in the 1960s. The art deco revival follows the old rule, formulated by the former V&A fashion historian James Laver. He said the same costume will be:
Indecent... ten years before its time
Shameless... five years before its time
Outr? (daring)... one year before its time
Smart
Dowdy... one year after its time
Hideous... ten years after its time
Ridiculous... 20 years after its time
Amusing... 30 years after its time
Quaint... 50 years after its time
Charming... 70 years after its time
Romantic... 100 years after its time
Beautiful... 150 years after its time
Art deco is now somewhere between charming and romantic. In Camden Town, they've reconstructed the art deco fa?ade of the old Black Cat cigarette factory, where Carreras used to manufacture Craven A (it now houses advertising agencies and a health club). We'll see a lot more of this. Aptly, even the revival has been driven by the mass market. David Suchet's "Poirot" television series achieved its period flavour through using well-chosen art deco architecture as background.
Modernist architects and critics hated the way art deco treated modernism as just a style like any other: one more option in their pattern book of neo-Egyptian, neo-Mayan, neo-Roman. Writing about art deco factories and warehouses in the east end in the 1950s, Nikolaus Pevsner described them as "the 20th century at its worst."
I left the V&A with, in my mind's eye, the exhibition's repeated clip of Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and dozens of chorus girls in "The Gay Divorcee" (1934), and, in my ears, a loudspeaker's bright riffs from Fletcher Henderson and his band. How long will it be, I wondered, before today's despised commercialism is elevated to scholarly scrutiny.
McDonald's golden arches, for example, spring from a design by Le Corbusier, submitted to Stalin for an intended Palace of the Soviets. The design featured a soaring parabolic curve which the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen borrowed for the huge, arched Gateway to the West, erected in St Louis, Missouri. From here it was borrowed again, and doubled up, as the trademark initial on every McDonald's hamburger joint (the firm began in the midwest). When a McDonald's opened in perestroika Moscow, the symbol had come full circle. Is this any less significant, socially or aesthetically, than Corbusier's own architecture?
Art Deco 1910-1939 at V&A until 20 July. Accompanying book, edited by Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton & Ghislaine Wood, V&A Publications ?40.
