Hollywood
Movie Sets, Stars and the Art Deco Style
My love of
the Art Deco style led me to the discovery that many
decorative statues
from the 1920s and 1930s took their inspiration from
the world of cinema and particularly movie star portraits.
The
sophisticated Hollywood movie world shown on-screen from the
mid 1920s and throughout the 1930s was of modern, glamorous
spaces, of sharply defined geometric designs, luxurious
penthouses and stylish men and women.
These images
were often the first introduction most people had to the
radically different new "modern" style, a style we
now call Art
Deco, but originally referred to as Art
Moderne.
Star homes of that period often reflected the images on
the screen and magazines published photographs of the
grandest of them, among which was the mansion (recently
seen in Woody Allen's "Cafe Society") of Hollywood's top
art director, Cedric Gibbons and his actress
wife, Dolores Del Rio. Gibbons was head of the art
department at M-G-M and no other art director so greatly
imposed his own taste upon the films he designed.
Gibbons had attended the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale
des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Moderne (an
event that heavily influenced Hollywood set design and
from where the term Art Deco developed) and brought back
with him many of the room designs he had seen there
incorporating them into his films. Several art directors
who preceded him had used the Moderne style, giving
their sets a futuristic look that persisted in designs
for the 1930s serials such as Flash Gordon and Buck
Rogers but Gibbons' designs were idealized images of the
homes of the rich (which was opposed to the
egalitarian ideals of the styles originators who felt
good design should be for everyone).
Gibbons' style, which many other art directors followed,
flourished from the late 1920s. Silent films were giving
way to the "talkies" and it was the dawn of the age of
the "silver screen" with art directors, costume
designers and lighting experts worked together to create
tonal varieties with black and white. Greta
Garbo, dressed in dazzling white, transfixed as she
wandered through Gibbon's oversized sets in her late
1920s films and in 1933's Dinner at
Eight a platinum-haired Jean Harlow shimmered in white
satin in a room dominated by wide expanses of white. His
designs for the 1932 film Grand Hotel, featured a
stunning revolving-door entrance and a stylish lobby
that became icons of Hollywood's Art Deco style. Gibbons
even adapted his talents to stars residences, one of his
most exotic interior designs being for romantic movie
idol Ramon Navarro's 1928 Lloyd Wright
designed home (subsequently owned by Leonard
Bernstein, Diane Keaton and Christina Ricci).
Of
course Cedric Gibbons was not the only designer utlising
the style: Van Nest Polglase the head of RKO's art
department had a strong influence on the studio's design
(RKO was the home of the Fred Astaire- Ginger Rogers
musicals and their fantastical Art Deco sets) and there
were many others, notably Carroll Clark, Perry Ferguson,
Allan Abbott, Richard Day , William Cameron
Menzies, Merrill Pye, Anton Grot, Ben Carré, Charles D.
Hall and Hans Dreier.
20th
Century Decorative Arts has a large selection of Art
Deco Sculptures for sale.
