On August 31, the Sarasota Art Museum introduced ‘Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration,’ bringing together 100 rare and iconic posters from the interwar period, created by some of the most influential American and European graphic artists.
The exhibition showcases how both visual and material culture reflect the dynamic and progressive spirit of the interwar years—a turbulent, transformative era that found the perfect expression of its ideals and aspirations in Art Deco.
A+A recently interviewed Rangsook Yoon, senior curator at the Sarasota Art Museum via email about the exhibition. We’re pleased to run this interview in two parts – starting last Friday and continuing today:
Did Art Deco reach extend beyond the decorative arts? How and where?
Art Deco extended far beyond the decorative arts, simultaneously shaping the language of architecture, urban environments, domestic interiors, and virtually every facet of visual culture. Its skyscrapers and public buildings, from New York City’s Chrysler Building and Radio City Music Hall to Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and Mumbai’s Marine Drive—defined urban identities across continents. Beyond Europe, Art Deco reached cities in the Americas and the Caribbean, including Miami Beach, Chicago, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Havana, as well as in Casablanca, Durban, Shanghai, Tokyo and Mumbai. Hollywood cinema adopted Art Deco in sets, costumes, and logos, reinforcing its association with modernity and amplifying its worldwide influence. And on the international stage, world fairs, including the 1925 Paris Exposition also played a pivotal role in broadcasting its appeal, cementing it as the first truly global phenomenon.
Its design intent?
Art Deco’s core design intent was to capture the spirit of modernity, progress, and cosmopolitanism that defined the interwar period. It sought to to give modern life a distinctive look that expressed these optimistic ideals, combining utilitarianism and functionality with a sense of pleasure, beauty, and luxury, without alienating people—or consumers—with the avant-garde modernists’ rigorous austerity, purity and social utopian ideals.
How was it linked to modernism?
Art Deco drew inspirations from modernism, sharing roots in the early 20th-century avant-garde. Movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Bauhaus and De Stijl introduced geometric abstraction, fragmentation, and dynamism, which Art Deco designers adapted and translated into architecture, interiors, consumer goods and decorative patterns with more accessible ways. Like modernism, Art Deco celebrated the machine age, embracing speed, technology, and progress, and like the Bauhaus, it aimed to integrate art and life. However, it sought a broadly appealing, more consumer-friendly way.
For more, go here.
