Since our chief arts columnist’s piece on The Necessity for An Art Deco Revival was published on Thursday, some of you may have seen a minor disagreement play out on the timeline over on X. Rather than allow this to fizzle out in the bite-sized ephemera of (do we still call them tweets?) or to allow, as is the nature of such platforms, the charged enthusiasms of our principle proponents to boil over in a stream of vituperation, I have invited them to make their cases here. The idea being that with adequate space they might make their respective arguments with rigour, and that the reader, who I hope will be the chief beneficiary, might decide the matter better for themselves. So, without further ado, here is the first response:

Dear Editor,

Art Deco is a style of design — principally furniture and interior decorations and architecture. It is not an art style in the sense of painting or poetry. Like other design movements from the 19th century deco was concerned with using industrial processes like printing presses and foundries.

It is one thing to be inspired by art of the past, it is another to confuse the exigencies of art practice with processes intended to produce a given appearance. Appearances are an effect of a foundation and a structure. A “style” is a label for that appearance. A style is a manner of doing (labeled ex post facto by enemies, idiots or flatterers) which is either:

Deco, in so far as it concerns painting, is Post-Impressionism used in interior decoration or adapted and subordinated to machine processes. But the situation of the 1920s and 30s is not our situation because: 1 — we are not Post-Impressionists; we are serious and struggling artists mired in the postmodernist catastrophe. And 2 — the machines of today are different and more flexible than those of 100 years ago.

Regards,

Paul Rhoads

You can follow Paul on X here.

Featured image: Folie Bergère, Paris. Photograph by Jana Froembgen