Ornament and Glory: Artifacts of the Jazz Age and Lost Generation
By Charles Giuliano
In "The Thin Man" (1934) the debonair amateur sleuth, Nick Charles, was a man who enjoyed slumming with thugs and hoods, also liked to mix up a few Martinis. Nick (William Powell) is gamely joined in this binge drinking by his foxy, witty wife Nora (Myrna Loy). The couple is accompanied by a small, feisty dog. Apparently, the family that gets sloshed together stays together. In the classic Hollywood era of, what critics would dub, Film Noir, when glamorous couples were not knocking back rows of Singapore Slings and Martinis (also the preferred pre dinner intoxicants of the world leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill; Stalin probably hit the Stoli neat), they smoked. Drank, kissed, made love, smoked, drank again. "Play it again Sam."
While recently researching into the "Lost Generation" and "Americans in Paris" I learned that the paradigm of chic, Gerald Murphy–of whom F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The rich are different from us"–was renowned for his inventive evening cocktails. During one such occasion in Antibes, Zelda, Fitzgerald’s wife, flew off a cliff seemingly miraculously inspired by a Murphy libation. She amazingly survived with skinned knees.
It was both staggering and sad to read what fall down drunks Fitzgerald and his Princeton cronies were. It was a time of raccoon coats, Stutz Bearcat roadsters, hip flasks, Bettie Boop de Boop and all that jazz. After that, the tide of taste and fashion went out. Taking with it an ever more desperate Fitzgerald. The advent of WWII was sobering. The taste and style that preceded it seemed ever so decadent, dated and outr�. While Fitzgerald’s greatest rival, Ernest Hemingway, survived and flourished, Scott, like Zelda before him, went off the cliff. (And not as performance art.)
There was nothing glamorous about the Holocaust, the A Bomb, the devastation of post war Europe, Marshall Plan, Iron Curtain, McCarthyism and Cold War that followed the Jazz Age in which Art Deco reigned as the ultimate expression of modernism. All those sleekly designed, chromed cocktail shakers, cigarette lighters, bakelite radios, Fiesta Ware ceramics, depression and carnival glass became flea market and yard sale items. Along with cloche hats, slinky dresses, and beaded evening clutches.
While in London, in May of 2003, at the urging of my colleague and authority in the field of design, Mark Favermann, I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum to view the sprawling and wiz bang shazaam exhibition "Art Deco 1910-1939." It was like so oop boop de boop, the cat’s pajamas, yamma jamma mamma. Making my way through the thronged galleries I was lured by the sweet seductive singing of Fats Waller or followed by the jungle music of the Duke Ellington orchestra. Monitors showed clips of Busby Berkeley classics like "Gold Diggers of 1935" and its coordinated tapping of some 150 dancers.
The exhibition was so over the top and super saturated with objects, from cars to cocktail shakers filling, no, stuffing the 13,000 square feet of space, that I wondered just how they would pack off all that material to the Museum of Fine Arts where the show is now on view through January 9.
Well, the sad truth is that they didn’t. At the MFA, the work is installed oh so tastefully and discreetly into just 8,000 square feet. That reduction by some 5,000 square feet makes a world of difference. For one thing, the galleries are dead silent. No Fats Waller. Or clips of Hollywood.
Don’t get me wrong. This is a magnificent exhibition and you should make every effort to see it. But, let’s be clear, it’s the Reader’s Digest version of the London show. Here it is, well, just so damned tame. Was this a budget decision? Was the MFA just too cheap to go the whole nine yards? After all, they did expand the Monet show a couple of years ago by opening up galleries that are next to the special exhibition area. They could have, for example, gotten rid of the gift shop or moved it. No, it would appear that selling nick knacks, mugs and scarves had a greater priority than expanding the exhibition. Interestingly, the shop is selling DVD’s of films and CD’s of sound tracks that were an integral part of the London experience. If you can’t see or hear that here, well, pay and take it home.
Or, come back from September 30 through October 1 & 2 to view the classic film "Metropolis" with live accompaniment of Alloy Orchestra in the museum auditorium. The Fritz Lang silent film captures the science fiction fantasy of glitzy modernity.
The MFA show, while sadly watered down, is still pretty terrific. It splendidly reveals spectacular objects in an era that worshiped style through design. There is the sad contrast of a time of high style compared to the non style or bad style that prevails today.
One may tour this exhibition as an exercise in deconstruction. Just what was it about the era of high modernism that allowed for wallowing in glamour and ornamentation? How did that devolve into the notion of function and minimalism? Was it the Bauhaus, and its credo that less is more, that killed Art Deco and its taste for ornamentation? By what process did architecture change from the decorative Chrysler Building or Rockefeller Center to the glass and steel monoliths of Mies van de Rohe? When did the backlash of Post Modernism set in and evolve into the Tom Wolfe idea that "Less is a bore?" How did all that Bauhaus design start to look so tedious? Why is this exhibition so embedded with notions of fashion, class and glamour?
Clearly, as even a superficial run through this exhibition demonstrates, to fully enjoy art deco one had to be rich. In the 1920s there were a lot of people with money but not much class or taste. They could, however, just buy it. Hence Fitzgerald’s masterpiece "The Great Gatsby" the only book by the author still widely read.
Whom the gods love dies young. The first Blonde Bombshell, the most glamorous star of her era, Jean Harlow, was dead at 26 in 1937. She was the essence of raw sex poured into those silky gowns that allowed for no bras straps or panty lines. Her sexuality was withering but she could also be raw, earthy and fun.
There is a kind of guilty pleasure in touring this exhibition and drooling to possess even a few of its exotic items. A case in point is a magnificent leather Louis Vuitton men’s travel case. It has lots of brushes and endless bottles of cologne. One would imagine it being used by the Duke of Windsor or Cole Porter. That’s when men were groomed. Not today’s ten minute morning SS&S. And cologne? Please.
So there is a kind of post Marxist, politically correct, knee jerk response to this show that it represents everything that was wrong about our society. It plays on the exotic and revels in colonial chic. The Ancient Near East and Egyptian, Pre Columbian, and Far Eastern as designer kitsch. As a kid I loved to visit the exotic Egyptian Theater in Brighton with its lobby that resembled Pharaoh’s tomb. By current PC standards there is something embarrassing about Josephine Baker swinging her bananas in Paris, or Uncle Tom in the campy singing of Fats Waller. Today we are all too aware of the racism of Stepin Fetchit, Amos and Andy, and Charlie Chan in popular culture.
The peak of the Art Deco movement was celebrated in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, an exhibition dedicated to modern design that was held in Paris in 1925. The term Art Deco derives from that event which is recreated in sections of the MFA exhibition. It demonstrates the internationalism of the movement.
While we primarily regard Art Deco as represented by the decorative arts, architecture, interior design and the set designs for big budget Hollywood musicals, there is an uncomfortable subset of its odd relationship to high art, painting and sculpture.
In its lowest manifestation it appears in this exhibition as the sexy, decorative kitsch of a long forgotten artist, and one of the real stars of this show, again a guilty pleasure, Tamara de Lempicka. She has a thing for pointy nipples and clinging drapery in a futurist frenzy. I enjoyed her Jeune fille en vert so much I bought the mug to enjoy my morning coffee. The exhibition includes the MFA’a "Brooklyn Bridge" by Joseph Stella, as well as its Lipchitz designed fireplace surround and paintings by Gleizes, Picasso and Leger. Picasso is a stretch but one can see a lot of Art Deco in the molded industrial forms of Leger.
The theme of high art, low art and kitsch is an enormous topic here just nibbled at. There seems to be a constant swing between populist opulence and decoration and a kind of high art, minimalist, Calvinist denial of all sensuality. Popular art such as the paintings of de Lempicka do not enter the canon of high art because they are just too accessible. But low art gets appropriated back into high art as kitsch. It’s again OK to enjoy the Art Deco of decaying Miami, suck up to campy Vegas chic, or find vicarious pleasure in a Busby Berkeley film. Because we are cool, post modernist intellectuals.
The trouble is that during the time frame in which the works and objects of this magnificent exhibition were created and consumed there was none of that all important irony. It was the real deal.
At least until 1939, and the New York World Fair with its promise of the "World of Tomorrow." Its symbols were the Perisphere and Trylon. My mother, pregnant at the time, carried me to the Fair on numerous occasions. She made remarkable 16 MM home movies and talked about it with us when we were kids as one of the great events of her life.
It is fitting that 1939 and the New York World Fair is the book end for the great era of ornament and glory. When design had the potential to make our lives better. The war ended that. Or at least temporarily derailed it. After the War, as a child and teenager, I was wowed by the annual Autorama shows. On Sunday nights the family huddled around our Philco TV. We watched the Ed Sullivan show and never missed General Electric Theater whose host, Ronald Reagan, told us that at GE, "Progress is our most important product." It seemed then that there was hope of a better world. It was a time of Martinis and dreams. Today is Bud Light. Less filling but tasteless.
