Art Déco

A taste, a fascination, a language that characterized Italian and European artistic production in the 1920s, with mainly American results after 1929. What for everyone corresponds to the definition of Art Déco was an eclectic, worldly, international lifestyle. The success of this moment of taste must be recognized in the search for luxury and a pleasantness of life, all the more intense as they are ephemeral, fielded by the European bourgeoisie after the dissolution, in the Great War, of the last nineteenth-century myths and the mimesis of industrial reality, with the logic of its production processes. Ten unbridled, "roaring" years of the great international bourgeoisie, while history drew the gloomy horizon of totalitarianisms between war, revolutions and inflation.

As part of a recent rediscovery of culture and art in the 1920s and, in particular, of that particular taste defined "Style 1925", from the year of the well-known Universal Exhibition in Paris dedicated to Arts Decoratifs, hence the successful formula Art Déco, which sanctioned morphologies and models, the idea of an exhibition was born that proposes images and reinterpretations of a series of historical-cultural events and artistic phenomena that crossed Italy and Europe in the period between the first post-war period and the world crisis of 1929, gradually taking on national declinations and characteristics, as shown not only by the numerous architectural, pictorial and sculptural works, but above all by the extraordinary production of decorative arts.

The Déco taste was the style of cinemas, railway stations, theaters, ocean liners, public buildings, large bourgeois residences: it was, above all, a stylistic form, with clearly recognizable features, which it influenced at different levels the entire production of decorative arts, from furniture to ceramics, from the windows to wrought iron, from jewelery to fashion fabrics in the twenties and early thirties, as well as the shape of cars, advertising signs, sculpture and painting in decorative function.

The Déco phenomenon crossed the decade 1919-1929 with a disruptive force with furnishings, ceramics, glass, worked metals, fabrics, bronzes, stuccos, jewels, silver, clothes, embodying the vigor of high artisan and proto-industrial production and contributing to the birth of design and "Made in Italy". The demand from a market increasingly thirsty for novelty, but at the same time nostalgic for the tradition of Italian artistic craftsmanship, had literally caused an extraordinary production of objects and decorative forms to explode in the 1920s: from the lighting systems of Martinuzzi, Venini and the Fontana Arte by Pietro Chiesa, to ceramics by Gio Ponti, Giovanni Gariboldi, Guido Andloviz, from the sculptures of Adolfo Wildt, Arturo Martini and Libero Andreotti, to the Lenci statues or to the highly original sculptures by Sirio Tofanari, from the Byzantine goldsmiths of Ravasco to silver of the Finzi, from the furnishings of Buzzi, Ponti, Lancia, Portaluppi to the precious silks of Ravasi, Ratti and Fortuny, as well as the cloth tapestries by Depero.