Report on 'Art Deco Silver & Jewellery'
Stanmore & District U3A were delighted to welcome Mark Lewis at Glebe Hall on Monday 20th February 2017 to talk to us about Art Deco Silver and Jewellery.
Mark is a designer-maker, specialising in silversmithing and jewellery and also a landscape artist. He also became a teacher and has a wide range of talks some relating to his profession and others just hobbies.
Mark started off with how Art Deco evolved in response to art development before this period. He showed examples of Art Nouveau which proceeded the Art Deco period which was post WW1.
Art Nouveau came out of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century with soft flowing sensual jewellery and sculpture such as naked ladies. He mentioned C.R. Ashbee a well known 19th century silversmith who made everything by hand. WW1 came and the influence changed.
Crafts took a knock in WW1 and it became too expensive to make hand crafted work and it was then considered frivolous. There was a need for technical advances, cleaner lines and less expensive and designs were influenced by the Bauhaus movement from which design was sharper and had cleaner lines. A Brandt teapot was illustrated Circa 1924.
These designs were quite austere and very functional and also very radical, this lead the way for Art Deco which appeared in 1920s with this new era of thinking!
Other influences to this new artistic period was the 1922 Tutankhamun Exhibition held in Paris which influence design with an explosion of colour and angular designs from ancient Egypt.
In 1925 the Paris exhibition of “Des Art Decoratif et Industriels Modernes” displayed items that were considered too decadent and expensive.
Fashion was also influenced by the new movement and clothes became easier to wear with shorter and cleaner lines. Coco Chanel produced new designs around 1925. (A slide of typical “flapper” dresses was illustrated).
Railway stations and Shipping lines changed design and were developing, many examples remain today. Architecture was affected by Egyptian influence of clean lines strong colours and heavily adorned walls and ceilings and iconic buildings such as the Chrysler Building in New York City were erected in 1930 and the famous McGraw Hill Building also in New York 1931 with a very dramatic façade, all typical of the Art Deco movement. Odeon Cinemas in the UK were another example.
Silver went from being individually produced hand made and expensive to mass produced items in 1930 which made silver much cheaper to buy. In 1930s this influence reached the UK with British Silver designers and many were architects by profession utilising their skills in silver design.
It was exotic, ranged from the sublime to ridiculous, frivolous and colourful, but Art Deco couldn’t last and went into decline after WW2.
It never totally died out over the last 60 years and has a couple of revivals in popularity in this time.