History of Art Deco Painting Automatic translate

Art Deco painting emerged as an independent artistic movement in the first decades of the 20th century, reflecting the era’s desire for luxury, modernity, and geometric precision. The style reached its peak between the 1920s and early 1940s, when artists on both sides of the Atlantic created works that embodied the spirit of the times — from portraits of society ladies to monumental murals with industrial motifs.

Origins and formation of style

Art Deco painting emerged in France in the 1910s, on the eve of World War I. The term "Art Deco" derives from the name of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts ) Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes ), held in Paris in 1925. This event officially established the new movement in world art and gave it the name by which it is known today.

The style developed as a reaction to the ornamentation of Art Nouveau. Artists rejected the organic, sinuous lines of the previous period, opting instead for clear geometry and streamlined forms. From its very beginning, Art Deco painting absorbed influences from Cubism, from which it borrowed the simplified geometry of forms and fragmentation of space.

The Viennese Secession also left its mark on the new movement’s aesthetics. Artists combined strict geometry with decorativeness, creating a unique synthesis that distinguished Art Deco painting from pure modernism. The vibrant colors of Fauvism found their way into the new style’s palette, adding expressiveness and emotion.

The influence of the Russian Seasons

Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had a profound influence on the visual language of Art Deco. The company began performing in 1909 and immediately captured the imagination of European audiences. Costumes and sets designed by Léon Bakst, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova showcased a bold combination of exotic motifs and geometric patterns.

Bakst’s works for the productions of "The Firebird" and "Scheherazade" were distinguished by rich, jewel-toned colors and stylized forms. These visual solutions directly influenced Art Deco painters, who adopted the rich color palette and decorative approach to composition. Goncharova introduced elements of Russian folk art, enriching the visual vocabulary of early Art Deco.

Exotic sources of inspiration

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 sparked a wave of Egyptomania, which was immediately reflected in painting. Artists began incorporating motifs of scarabs, pyramids, and stylized hieroglyphic symbols into their compositions. Ancient Egyptian art attracted Art Deco masters with its geometric rigor and monumentality.

Aztec and Mayan art also served as a source of inspiration. The stepped forms of Mesoamerican temples and the repeating geometric patterns of ancient ornamentation blended seamlessly with the style’s aesthetic. Artists borrowed not only formal elements but also the sense of monumentality characteristic of pre-Columbian civilizations.

Eastern influences came from the art of China, Japan, India, and Persia. These diverse sources fused into a unified style, where exoticism served not as a citation but as a springboard for the creation of a new visual language. Art Deco artists transformed historical motifs into contemporary decorative elements, devoid of ethnographic precision but full of stylistic expressiveness.

Characteristic features of Art Deco painting

Geometry and composition

Geometric shapes became the foundation of the visual language of Art Deco painting. Triangles, circles, squares, and rectangles were arranged into complex compositions, creating a sense of order and precision. Zigzags, chevrons, and stepped shapes were repeated as decorative motifs, lending a recognizable rhythm to the works.

Symmetry played a central role in the composition. Artists often used mirror images of elements around a central axis, creating balance and staticity. However, this balance did not imply monotony — dynamism was achieved through contrasting scales, color accents, and diagonal lines.

The V-shaped compositional structure became a favorite technique among portrait painters. This arrangement guided the viewer’s gaze to the model’s face, enhancing the portrait’s impact. Tamara de Lempicka masterfully utilized this technique, arranging elements so that the upper portion of the canvas contained more detail than the lower portion.

Color palette

The Art Deco palette was bold and contrasting. Black and gold were the style’s most iconic combination, symbolizing both industrial progress and luxury. This combination was used in a ratio of approximately 70% black surfaces, 20% gold accents, and 10% cream or ivory shades.

Deep navy blue paired with silver created the atmosphere of a night sky. The artists applied a gradation from midnight blue through mid-blue tones to soft lavender hues, finishing the composition with silvery metallic highlights. Emerald green, sapphire blue, and ruby red represented the jewel-toned palette.

Metallic accents permeated Art Deco painting. Gold dominated, silver added a modern touch, bronze brought warmth, and chrome provided a cool sophistication. Artists imitated metallic sheen using specialized paint application techniques and surface varnishing. These finishes transformed basic geometric patterns into statements of luxury.

Equipment and materials

Art Deco painters strove for a smooth, polished surface. Unlike the Impressionists with their visible brushstrokes, Art Deco masters created images of almost photographic quality. The boundaries between forms were clear and defined, without blur or atmospheric effects.

Varnishing became a characteristic feature of the technique. Artists often used Japanese lacquer to create a glossy surface that enhanced the impression of luxury and modernity. Multiple layers of varnish created depth of color and a mirror-like shine, particularly effective in dark areas of the composition.

The simplification of volumes to cylindrical and crystalline forms was characteristic of Art Deco portraiture. Tamara de Lempicka, explaining her method, said, "My goal is never to copy, but to create a new style, clear, luminous colors, and to sense the elegance of the models." She transformed human figures into sculptural forms while maintaining a portrait-like resemblance.

Leading Masters and Their Contributions

Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) became the most famous representative of Art Deco painting. The Polish artist, who worked in France and the United States, specialized in polished portraits of aristocrats and wealthy clients. Her breakthrough came in 1925 at the International Exhibition, where she exhibited her works at the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon of Women Artists.

American journalists from Harper’s Bazaar and other fashion publications noticed her paintings, and Lempicka’s name became famous. Her style was particularly recognizable: she focused almost exclusively on portraits, unlike other Art Deco artists, who often created large murals with numerous figures.

Lempicka developed a unique system of compositional techniques. She used parallel lines to direct the viewer’s gaze, a V-shaped structure to enhance the portrait’s impact, and carefully placed color accents. Her highly stylized nudes displayed the same geometric rigor as her portraits of society ladies.

Jean Dupas

Jean Dupas (1882–1964) belonged to a group of leading Art Deco artists. He specialized in monumental panels and wall compositions that decorated the opulent interiors of the era. His 1925 work, "Les Perruches" (Parrots), was created specifically to decorate a room in the Hotel du Collecteur at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts.

Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, the renowned Art Deco furniture designer, commissioned Dupas to create and execute a painting to decorate one of the pavilion’s rooms. The panel was originally hung above the fireplace and showcased Dupas’s signature style, with an ethereal background, a landscape, and a pair of stylized animals.

Dupas often depicted two animals — dogs, antelopes, or gazelles — in two contrasting colors. His works were distinguished by rich, soft colors, creating an atmosphere of refined luxury. Dupas’s style influenced the cinema decor of the time, where monumental panels created illusory worlds.

Josep Maria Sert

Josep Maria Sert worked primarily in grisaille, using all shades of gray to create effects reminiscent of sculptural marble relief. He favored metallic colors, reminiscent of daguerreotype photographs. He placed architectural elements diagonally in his compositions, creating a sense of depth and spaciousness.

By 1910, Sert had fully devoted himself to frescoes and other large-scale works. He collaborated with Sergei Diaghilev, creating sets for the Ballets Russes. In 1929, the artist received a commission for a series of large canvases, painted in his characteristic grisaille style, to cover the walls of the rebuilt Church of San Telmo in San Sebastian.

Sert’s works depicted various historical chapters of Basque life in an epic vein. His monumental style perfectly matched the spirit of Art Deco, with its striving for grandeur and theatricality. The gray monochrome created a unique atmosphere of solemnity and timelessness.

Erte

Romain de Tirtov, known by his pseudonym Erté (1892–1990), achieved fame with his elegant fashion illustrations that captured the look of an entire era. His delicate figures and refined, glamorous designs are instantly recognizable, and his ideas continue to influence 21st-century fashion. Erté worked as a painter, sculptor, costume designer, and theatrical set designer.

His costumes and sets graced the Ziegfeld Follies of 1923, many productions of the Folies Bergère , and George White’s Scandals . Erté’s most famous image was "Symphony in Black," which depicts a tall, slender woman draped in black and holding a slender black dog. This influential image has been reproduced and copied countless times.

Erté continued to work throughout his life, creating designs for revues, ballets, and operas. In the 1960s, during the Art Deco revival, his career experienced a resurgence and received widespread recognition. Erté’s works embodied the spirit of Art Deco at its most refined and decorative.

Other significant artists

Diego Rivera, Rockwell Kent, and Louis Lozowick were also among the prominent Art Deco artists. Lozowick (1892–1973), a Ukrainian-American artist and printmaker, is known for his Art Deco lithographs, which he began creating in the 1920s. His works are recognized as exemplary of Art Deco and Precisionism, primarily featuring streamlined, urban monochrome lithographs.

Janet Flint, curator of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the National Museum of American Art, wrote in 1982: "Louis Lozowick occupies a preeminent place among artists whose imagination has been touched by the city with its rich diversity of architectural forms." In his paintings, drawings, and especially his superb lithographs, Lozowick achieved new aesthetic dimensions in his interpretations of America’s skyscrapers, smokestacks, elevated trains, and bridges.

Lozovik lived in Europe from 1919 to 1924, where he met Moholy-Nagy, Lissitzky, and several other avant-garde artists. Returning to New York, he joined the editorial board of the magazine New Masses in 1924, where his geometric realist style was well received.

Art Deco painting in Europe

School of Paris

Paris remained the center of Art Deco painting throughout the 1920s. The city attracted artists from across Europe, creating a cosmopolitan environment where diverse influences and traditions blended. The 1925 International Exhibition became the catalyst that finally established the new style in the artistic life of the French capital.

Artists of the Parisian Art Deco school worked at the intersection of easel painting and decorative painting. Many of them received commissions to decorate luxurious private residences, fashionable boutiques, and restaurants. Their style combined the sophistication of French tradition with contemporary forms and techniques.

Women artists occupied a prominent place in Art Deco painting. Besides Lempicka, other artists whose works were exhibited at the Salon des Femmes Peintres also worked. They created portraits, fashion illustrations, and decorative panels, contributing to the visual identity of the era.

Impact on European centers

Beyond France, Art Deco painting developed in other European capitals. Each region contributed its own distinctive features, adapting the style’s general principles to local traditions and tastes. The geometric foundation and decorative elements remained constant, but color preferences and themes varied.

The Viennese Secession continued to influence the Central European version of Art Deco. Artists from this region maintained a stronger connection to symbolism and ornamentation than their French counterparts. Metallic accents and geometric patterns were used more sparingly.

Eastern European artists who came to Western capitals enriched Art Deco painting with elements of folk art. This synthesis created a unique expressiveness, fusing archaic motifs with ultra-modern forms. Goncharova’s works demonstrated how traditional imagery could be transformed into the language of Art Deco.

Art Deco Painting in the United States

Penetration of style

The Art Deco style, which originated in France on the eve of World War I, had a significant influence on architecture and design in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the 1925 Paris Exposition, American artists and designers began actively adopting the new visual language. Art Deco reached its peak in the United States in the 1930s.

New York City became the main center of American Art Deco. Artists there used the new style to express the spirit of the modern metropolis, with its skyscrapers, dynamism, and technological advances. The paintings reflected a fascination with the industrial era and the urban experience.

Los Angeles began actively embracing Art Deco in the late 1920s, during a period of significant business expansion fueled by population growth. Early buildings were predominantly in the zigzag style, but the stock market crash and prolonged depression soon forced this expansive version of the style to give way to a more restrained, streamlined modernism.

Precisionism and Art Deco

Precisionism developed alongside Art Deco and shared many points of contact with it. Strongly influenced by Cubism and Futurism, its main themes were industrialization and the modernization of the American landscape, depicted in precise, clearly defined geometric forms.

The movement expressed a certain reverence for the industrial era, although social commentary was not fundamental to the style. The degree of abstraction within the movement varied considerably — Charles Sheeler’s works were sometimes almost photorealistic. His breakthrough paintings, "American Landscape" (1930) and "Classical Landscape" (1931), were painted in oil on canvas, which helped emphasize the precision of the representation.

Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O’Keeffe created cityscapes that combined Art Deco geometry with a realistic interpretation of American reality. Their works depicted factories, skyscrapers, bridges, and other industrial structures as the embodiment of modernity and progress.

Monumental painting

In the late 1930s, during the Great Depression, Art Deco featured prominently in the architecture of grand public projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration. Artists were commissioned to create monumental murals for post offices, libraries, and other government buildings.

These wall compositions often depicted labor, technological advances, and optimistic images of American life. Art Deco’s geometric structure was ideal for conveying the power of machines and the organized nature of industrial processes. The style combined decorativeness with ideological content.

Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist, created murals in the United States that combined the traditions of Mexican muralism with Art Deco aesthetics. His monumental compositions for the Detroit Institute of Arts and Rockefeller Center demonstrated how Art Deco could serve as a vehicle for social and political expression.

Streamline Moderne

Evolution of style

Streamline Moderne emerged in the 1930s as an evolution of Art Deco. Inspired by aerodynamic design, it emphasized curving forms, long horizontal lines, and sometimes nautical elements. In response to the economic austerity of the Great Depression, the style moved away from the opulent, vertical, and ornamental characteristics of earlier Art Deco.

Streamline Moderne embraced a clean, functional, and machine-inspired aesthetic. The style was defined by an emphasis on sleek, aerodynamic forms characterized by rounded corners, long horizontal lines ("speed lines"), and smooth, unadorned surfaces. The paintings of this period reflected these same principles.

Streamline Moderne artists simplified forms to a minimum, eliminating unnecessary ornamentation. The color palette became more restrained, favoring silver and chrome over gold. Compositions emphasized horizontal movement, creating a sense of speed and dynamism even in static images.

Theme and imagery

Streamline Moderne painting focused on images of modern transportation — locomotives, ocean liners, automobiles, and airplanes. These objects embodied the idea of movement and progress. Artists depicted them with streamlined, almost abstract forms, emphasizing the beauty of functionality.

Urban landscapes acquired a new character. Skyscrapers were depicted not as vertical towers of power, but as elements of horizontally organized urban space. Bridges, overpasses, and industrial structures became independent protagonists of compositions.

Streamline Moderne portraiture became even more simplified. Figures became more abstract, faces more generalized. The emphasis shifted from the sitter’s individuality to the modern persona — dynamic, confident, and forward-looking.

Motives and themes

Theatricality and lighting

Themes of theater and lighting permeated Art Deco painting. Artists often used triangular shapes that widened from bottom to top, mimicking the look of theater spotlights. These triangles could radiate outward like sunbeams, creating a design that radiated light and produced a beacon-like effect.

The nightlife of large cities, with its neon signs and illuminations, inspired artists. Contrasts of light and shadow, vibrant splashes of color against a dark background, and dramatic lighting of figures — all of this reflected the atmosphere of the nightlife of the Jazz Age. The works sought not simply to depict, but to create a spectacle.

Bold ornamentation, contrast, and scale were often used to reflect theatrical performances. Artists created compositions that represented not just ordinary choir members, but outstanding soloists. Each work was intended to attract attention, surprise, and impress the audience.

Fashion and glamour

Art Deco painting was closely linked to the world of fashion. Portraits of aristocrats, socialites, and members of the new bohemians showcased the latest trends in clothing, hairstyles, and accessories. Artists contributed to fashion magazines, creating illustrations that shaped the visual image of the era.

Tamara de Lempicka and Bernard Boutet de Monvel depicted their sitters with gloss and sophistication. The sheen of satin, the sparkle of diamonds, and the shimmer of furs were conveyed through meticulously rendered surfaces. The portraits themselves became luxurious objects befitting the status of the subjects.

Elegance became the central aesthetic of Art Deco. Artists sought not so much psychological depth as the creation of an ideal modernity. Their designs embodied the spirit of the times — confidence, independence, and a desire for pleasure and the beauty of life.

Industrial images

Machines, factories, and technological objects became important themes in Art Deco painting, especially in the American version of the style. Artists admired the geometry of industrial structures, the rhythm of production processes, and the power of steam turbines and electric generators. These objects were depicted with reverence, as symbols of progress.

Skyscrapers, smokestacks, elevated trains, and bridges became favorite motifs of urban painting. The city was presented as an organized system of geometric forms, where each element occupied its place in the overall composition. The chaos of street life was transformed into an ordered pattern of lines and planes.

Louis Lozowick created monochrome lithographs of urban scenes, where industrial objects acquired an almost abstract beauty. His works demonstrated how the geometry of factories and port facilities could become the basis for pure visual pleasure, regardless of the functional purpose of the objects depicted.

Decline and Transformation

The Impact of World War II

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 marked the end of the Art Deco movement. Wartime, with its social restrictions, made Art Deco even more decadent than it had previously seemed. It was a decadence that suddenly seemed out of place in these dark, austere, and turbulent times.

Throughout the period, the style competed with modernist architecture and painting, and with the onset of the war, modernism finally prevailed. The opulence and ornamentation of Art Deco clashed with the spirit of military mobilization and asceticism. Artists turned to more austere forms of expression, befitting the tragic times.

Resources previously devoted to creating luxurious interiors and decorative objects were now diverted to military needs. Commissions for monumental murals and portraits of society ladies virtually dried up. Many Art Deco artists were forced to find new outlets for their talents or abandon the profession altogether.

Oblivion and Rebirth

After the war, Art Deco was largely forgotten. Postwar aesthetics gravitated toward functionalism, minimalism, and social engagement. The luxury and decorativeness of the 1920s seemed relics of the past, out of touch with the reality of war-torn Europe and a changed world.

The 1960s saw a revival of the Art Deco style, which was embraced by both academics and popular culture. The name "Art Deco" came into use in 1968, during a period of scholarly reappraisal. Art scholars and historians began systematically studying the movement, recognizing its contribution to the development of 20th-century visual arts.

Many original buildings were restored and became historical monuments. Works by forgotten Art Deco artists were brought back from museums and private collections. Erté experienced a renewed interest in his work and gained widespread recognition in the final decades of his life.

Heritage

Art Deco painting left an indelible mark on the history of 20th-century art. The style demonstrated how decorativeness could be combined with modernity, luxury with geometric rigor, and tradition with radical renewal of form. Art Deco artists created a visual language that remains recognizable and influential to this day.

The influence of Art Deco painting can be seen in modern fashion, graphic design, and advertising. Geometric patterns, contrasting color combinations, and metallic accents continue to be used by 21st-century designers. The images created by Art Deco masters have become part of the collective visual experience of Western culture.

Compositional techniques developed by Art Deco artists have become part of the arsenal of modern artists. The V-shaped portrait structure, the use of parallel lines to direct the eye, and the strategic placement of color accents — these techniques continue to be used in various forms of visual art. Art Deco’s legacy lives on not only in museum collections but also in everyday visual culture today.