University Times

Garbo, before she spoke. Joan Crawford in hemlines shockingly raised above the knee. Busby Berkeley’s bathing beauties. Fred Astaire in silhouette. All are familiar images spawned by the Art Deco movement, which at its peak between the two World Wars was the most influential fashion and arts style in the world — and which continues to influence fashion styles and architecture today.

At first Americans were ambivalent about the movement, belatedly joining Europeans in the Art Deco craze of the 1920s and ’30s — except in Hollywood, where the movement achieved early prominence, eventually pulling average Americans along with it, according to Pitt film expert Lucy Fischer.

“While a positive response to Modernism was slow to take hold in America,” Fischer said in a Sept. 29 history of art and architecture lecture, “ultimately, the United States would become a major proponent and practitioner of the Art Deco aesthetic,” including constructing such landmark homages as Radio City Music Hall and the Empire State Building.

Drawing from material in her seventh book, “Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco and the Female Form” (Columbia University Press, 2003), Fischer, professor of film studies and English and director of Pitt’s film studies program, discussed the ways in which American cinema of The Roaring ’20s and The Dirty ’30s was beholden to European influences.

In a chicken-or-egg paradox, the dynamics of transnational influence flowed in both directions across the Atlantic, Fischer maintained, particularly with regard to Art Deco, a largely European invention originally dominated by French couture. American cinema had enjoyed international pre-eminence from the beginning of the 20th century, and by the 1920s and ’30s Hollywood films flooded French movie screens (in part because many French film production studios had been decimated by bombings in World War I).

“But it is also true that French design held tremendous sway over the look of that hegemonic American film product,” Fischer pointed out.

Known at its peak period as Modernism or the style Moderne, the term Art Deco was coined in the 1960s, derived from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes, held in Paris.

That exposition, in which 23 countries participated, was marked by the conspicuous absence of the United States, which had declined its invitation, perhaps due to a lack of confidence in American design despite a reputation for modernity and progress, Fischer surmised.

While American connoisseurs were well aware of the Modernism movement — the Paris exposition was widely reviewed here — some U.S. art critics thought it displayed bad taste or a symptom of Europe’s post-World War I malaise not shared in this country. “One group saw the trend as anathema to America’s sensibility and, therefore, called for its rejection,” Fischer said.

Characterized by symmetrical straight lines, slender shapes and graciousness of form, but leaning toward the exotic (with a pinch of the erotic, reflecting changing sexual morés in the 1920s and ’30s), the Art Deco period not only influenced couture and architecture, but furniture, sculpture, jewelry and graphic design as well.

And especially movies, Fischer said. “It would not be an overstatement to suggest that, in the ’20s and ’30s, every aspect of American film form was affected by the style Moderne,” she said, including set design and decoration (which eventually influenced home decor); costuming, especially of actresses; the “carriage” and physiognomy of actors through stage blocking and posing; the graphics of movie posters, and even the architecture of American movie theatres.

With 60 million-90 million American moviegoers a week by 1930, “The ubiquity of the Art Deco mode on movie screens of the era helped to popularize contemporary design in America,” Fischer said. In addition to the broad international force of the movement, there were a large number of European émigrés working in Hollywood, who brought a certain continental sophistication that influenced American culture, she said.

In MGM and Warner Bros. melodramas of the 1920s, when the desires of a forward-thinking woman propel the drama, the scene is often set in a lavish Art Deco home.

Greta Garbo’s 1929 silent classic “The Kiss,” for example, depicts a bored housewife who takes a lover, which eventually leads to her husband’s death and her own trial for his homicide. “The style Moderne signals not only female autonomy but danger, clearly associated with such liberation,” Fischer said. “The avant-garde environment in which she navigates [is illustrated] both spatially and morally.”

These melodramas, and the RKO musicals of the era, include “Deco touches,” such as an insistent geometry, a subtle use of indirect illumination, a nod to exoticism and, finally, “the sheer obsession with women — a Deco hallmark inherited from Art Nouveau,” Fischer said.

By 1935, the influence of Art Deco became so prominent that “America was beginning to challenge the pre-eminence of French couture — and America’s defiance was tied to the cinema,” Fischer said. “Hence a mere decade after the Art Deco exposition of 1925 — an event whose wares the United States did not produce and could only hope to imitate — America’s artistic ‘anxiety of influence’ had morphed into a stylistic ‘delusion of grandeur.’”

Art Deco’s influence lives on, if in diminished form, Fischer said. “Both the Great Depression and World War II obviously created an atmosphere in which questions of style and glamour were somewhat de-emphasized — in the ‘real’ world, at least, if not always on screen,” she said. Fads in furniture and clothing emerge all the time, but thus far have failed to earn a tag comparable to Art Deco.

“On some level, the Art Deco style has never really retreated, which is one sure sign of its ‘classicism’ and vitality. For the past decade or so, Art Deco has had a strong influence on contemporary design, as in large, curvilinear furniture, in the revival of the popularity of Fiestaware pottery and in the architectural style of such local shopping centers as The Galleria in Mt. Lebanon.”

—Peter Hart