art deco or art moderne, term that designates a style of design that originated in French luxury goods shortly before World War I and became ubiquitously and internationally popular during the 1920s and 30s. Coined in the 1960s, the name derives from the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts, where the style reached its apex. Art deco is characterized by long, thin forms, curving surfaces, and geometric patterning. The practitioners of the style attempted to describe the sleekness they thought expressive of the machine age. The style influenced all aspects of the era's art and architecture, as well as the decorative, graphic, and industrial arts. Works executed in the art deco style range from skyscrapers and ocean liners to toasters, furniture by designers such as France's Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933), and accessories such as the elegant glass works of René Lalique. Since the 1960s and 70s the style has undergone a resurgence of popularity. Napier, New Zealand, which was rebuilt after a 1931 earthquake, has the largest unmixed concentration of art deco architecture in the world. Noted U.S. monuments to the style include New York's Rockefeller Center and Chrysler Building, the South Beach section of Miami Beach, Fla., and Fair Park, in Dallas, Tex.

or Style Moderne

Movement in design, interior decoration, and architecture in the 1920s and '30s in Europe and the U.S. The name derives from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925. Its products included both individually crafted luxury items and mass-produced wares, but, in either case, the intention was to create a sleek and antitraditional elegance that symbolized wealth and sophistication. Influenced by Art Nouveau, Bauhaus, Cubist, Native American, and Egyptian sources, the distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean shapes, often with a “streamlined” look; ornament that is geometric or stylized from representational forms; and unusually varied, often expensive materials, which frequently include man-made substances (plastics, especially bakelite; vita-glass; and ferroconcrete) in addition to natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and rock crystal). Typical motifs included stylized animals, foliage, nude female figures, and sun rays. New York City's Rockefeller Center (especially its interiors supervised by Donald Deskey), the Chrysler Building by William Van Alen, and the Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon are the most monumental embodiments of Art Deco.

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