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Art Deco: everything you wanted to know
00:39:35
From its flourishing in post-WWI Paris to its expansion through ocean liners and international expositions – and the London Underground – Emma Bastin reveals how Art Deco was a visual language of aspiration and change across the world during the interwar period
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- [00:04]
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
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History Extra Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Its influence is everywhere today, with geometric motifs, sleek lines and bold colours. Having a moment from velvet tub chairs that you might sit on in restaurants to Great Gatsby style gold leaf accents. Yet Art Deco is a movement that isn't easily defined. With us to dig in today's subject in more detail is Emma Bastin, a historian of the early 20th century. On the centenary of the Paris Expo that launched Art Deco onto the international stage, Emma joined Eleanor Evans to explore its origins and its lasting impact.
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Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
We are talking about Art Deco and Today's expert is Dr. Emma Bastin, who is a historian of early 20th century history, particularly focusing on the interwar period. Emma, thank you so much for joining me.
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
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Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
It's brilliant to have you here to guide us through this era of art Era of history. It's quite odd to be talking about an art topic on a podcast. So obviously it's very visual in nature, but we'll be doing our best to talk through it all and take in all our brilliant listener questions. And to begin, Emma, we wanna start with the basics, really. So what is Art Deco? And Gilly Buck on Instagram also has asked, when did Art Deco actually start?
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
Yep, absolutely. The last couple of everything you wanted to know podcasts have actually started with the experts saying, oh, this is a really tricky topic to define. And I'm actually gonna make it a hat trick because it really is quite a TR thing to define Art Deco because it's so broad. I think the first thing I'll do really, though, is to start with the dates, because that narrows it down a lot. So Art Deco was a movement that really, you know, we associate with the interwar period. We see its very early origins prior to the First World War. Then everything sort of slows down, obviously, because of the war. And then after the war, there's a big change and shift in mood. People are looking for different things. They're looking to modernity. They don't want to go back to what was there before. So art, sort of. And design. Take this idea and run with it. So by 1925, there's an enormous exhibition in France called Desartes Decorative Industriale Moderne, which is the exposition of modern industrial arts and decorative arts. And this really showcases to the world this sort of modern style. And it's picked up throughout the world. It's a global thing. And by the 1930s, people say art Deco is really reaching its peak and the height of its sophistication. But the Second World War brought it to a crashing close, really, for very obvious reasons. So it's very much, as I say, an interwar movement. In terms of what it is, it's a movement rather than a school. I think we can probably say it's the first global art movement, and I use the term movement as well rather than school, because a school tends to have a sort of manifesto. Whether it's formal or not, it's much more narrowly defined. Art Deco covers a huge number of media, so we have everything from architecture to fine art, graphic design, typography, films, photography, sculpture. There's an endless list of things that can be Art Deco. And I think one of the reasons it becomes so difficult to define is because you can't say that it looks a certain way, because obviously all these different media have different looks and different attributes. If we then talk about the characteristics, which, as I say, is very difficult. I think that the only thing you can really say is this stuff looked modern, it looked very different to things that had gone before. There was a lot less fussiness. So in the Victorian Edwardian period, things were very fussy, very detailed. Art Deco moves away from that. It goes for very bold geometric shapes, lots of strong motifs. Bold colour is again very important. And the materials that are used as well are often man made. They can also be very luxurious or they're designed to look luxurious. But the biggest thing that differentiates Art Deco, I think, is the fact that it embraces commerce and business and industrialisation. This is a movement that wants art to be available to the masses and not locked up in an ivory tower. Art can decorate anything and everything from a building to a plate and people should have access to this. I think that's a very long winded way of trying to define what Art Deco is and the era it sits in.
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Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
Not at all long winded. That was really great. Thank you for that introduction. And I should say at this stage as well, you've written a wonderful feature for the August 2025 issue of BBC History magazine, which people can find online to give a lot of other context and obviously lovely pictures of what we're talking about. And we've got a couple of listener questions Daria Popova on Instagram has asked.
- [06:50]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
About the origin of the Art Deco was given a name retrospectively. Like many art movements and periods at the time, it was just known as the Style Modern or the Modern Style, or by one of the various sort of smaller schools that made it up. It definitely wasn't seen as a thing. And it was only in the 1960s when people started looking back at the period and seeing this sort of, you know, something that was really bookended by the two wars and they needed something to describe it and define it. And so in the 1960s, we start seeing people looking back to this 1925 exhibition and thinking, oh, art decoratif. And it becomes shortened to Art Deco. There's no real sense of really who used this term first. It was banded around, you know, antique dealers. A couple of journalists mention it, but it's really an art historian and critic called Bevis Hillier who writes a book about Art Deco and says, this is what the style is and I'm going to call it Art Deco. And from that point it's popularised and given this term, this name, and it comes from this exhibition, incidentally, the exhibition in 1925 is often seen as the starting point of Art Deco. And so this year we're celebrating the centenary of Art Deco. Now, that's not necessarily the case because actually there was Art Deco stuff going on before the exhibition. And the whole reason the exhibition was held was to celebrate what had already happened. But the exhibition is very important in setting up what it is and its name.
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Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
So, as you said, the movement is hard to define. And that sort of centenary is. It's a useful hook to hang this conversation on and other celebrations as well, of rightly celebrating this movement. But obviously it's much more broad than that. Is it possible to pinpoint people who were leaders more broadly, who were sort of setting the standard for this modern type of art and design?
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
It's not, I'm afraid to say, it had a very broad base. I mean, we tend to look at Art Deco as having different feeds in. So Cubism, futurism, vorticism, all these things are feeding into Art Deco. But there's no particular individuals who are leading Art Deco. There are certainly people who became superstars, let's say, of Art Deco and who were famous then and or now for the work that they did. So some of the people that we might think about when we think about Art Deco are Tamara de Lempicko, who is a Polish artist, who did these incredible sort of soft Cubism pictures of normally women, but they have a sort of luminous glow to them. And her idea was to do something that had never been done before. We also have people like Jacques Emile Ruhlmann, who's making this incredibly luxurious furniture for the 1925 exhibition, which really sort of sets the glamour levels of Art Deco. There are people like Rene Lalique, who is a French glassware designer, who again, for the 1925 exhibition, created these enormous glass fountains, which sounds almost impossible, but, yeah, there were these enormous glass fountains that he created. You have other people doing different sort of things. Like we have Cedric Gibbons in the Hollywood, who's creating this Art Deco look in films, which is taking the furniture and the fashion and lighting, all these things, and making them look wonderful on film. And these eventually developed into what were called the big white sets. So if you think of a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire film, that's really based on the Cedric Gibbons idea of what Art Deco should be. And of course, people are watching these films in their millions, so that has a really big impact in terms of fashion design. We have people like Arte, who is a French illustrator, who illustrated designs for couturiers and also for the big fashion magazines, and he was a very early proponent of this modern style. So we definitely have individual who are, like I say, superstars of Art Deco. But what's interesting is, as well as these people, we also have businesses who are. This is, like I say, it's commercial form of art sometimes. And so there are businesses like Cunard who really take on Art Deco. So they not only deck out their Atlantic liners in an entirely modern Art Deco style, but their posters, for example, as well. There's a beautiful one, I think, of the Normandie, which, you know, is this very streamlined ship and is really still very iconic. The London Underground takes on Art Deco, you know, to encourage customers to use its lines and visit various outreaches of London. You have Echo, who make radios and they have these beautiful. The most outstanding design is this beautiful circular radio, which is like nothing that's ever been done before. Bagley Glassware, for example. So there are companies as well, who. So it's not just an individual that becomes superstars, it's specific companies as well that really embrace this idea and lead the way.
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Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
You gave us such wonderful visual examples there and I think everyone will be familiar with some aspect of this design. In terms of UK design, can we say. We've got a question from 814pat on Instagram, who's asked who was the most representative artist in the uk?
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
It has to be said that British Art Deco is not that strongly represented on the international scene. You know, I think everybody I've mentioned in that list before was not British. But in Britain we have architects like Joseph M and Charles Holden, who them and their respective practices really came up with some amazing sort of modern white wall, gleaming architecture. Joseph Emberton was involved in various sort of trade exhibitions, temporary exhibitions, but also at Blackpool, he's got this amazing building that was completed in only 1939, very late on, it's the casino there. And it's incredibly Art Deco. Charles Holden was involved heavily in the London Underground as well, and the Piccadilly line is particularly strong in Art Deco stations and things. So they're quite representative, I suppose. Clarice Cliff, of course. I think we've probably all watched an antiques program where someone shows up with their pieces of Clarice Cliff ceramic ware in incredibly bright colours. I tend to think of the crocus design, you know, and very unusual shapes that she came up with, you know, the conical sugar shakers and things like that. So they're up absolutely iconic and I would say representative. And I think the interesting thing about Claris Cliff as well is that it was relatively accessible, so it was sold in department stores. So it's certainly not cheap, but a lot of people could buy it, which, of course, is still why there's so much still available today. Betty Joel is really well renowned with the sort of art Deco world as producing this incredibly luxurious furniture. Celebrities put it in their homes. You know, it's featured in Vogue. It was beautiful. And I think actually to go back to the London Underground, it's not a particular person this. It's the whole stable of artists that Frank Pick pulled together in his role as director of the London Underground to produce some amazing art Deco posters that are still recognisable today. They turned London Underground into what has been known as the people's picture gallery. That's an incredibly important thing in Art Deco is getting people to embrace modernity. And they really did through the London Underground posters. So I think they're really sort of big hitters in British art Deco.
- [14:21]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
I think what you're giving us a sense of, and I'm finding it really interesting, is that we're very guilty of packaging it up, like you say, giving it this label of. Oh, yes, interwar period. Sort of roughly around that time, it's got the label of Art Deco. But I think seeing it through the eyes of those who would be looking at it and seeing it as this sort of opulent look towards the future with these lines and colors and everything else. Yeah, I think that's really striking.
- [14:44]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
Yeah, I think it's very difficult for us to realize what an impact it made on people at the time. I mean, we're looking at pieces that are left in museums. You know, the really, you know, the very expensive, luxurious items that were given to the va, for example. They have a fabulous collection, but it's absolutely not representative of what normal people were seeing. But equally, you know, there was more popular art deco that was out on the street that people were seeing, like these posters and the tube stations and various bits of architecture. Even, you know, you could buy art deco mirrors and things from your little woods catalog. So it's definitely something that's accessible and that. And that people are really literally buying into.
- [15:26]
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- [16:52]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
We've got a question here which perhaps again is a bit of a tricky one. I appreciate that Lauren, watching soccer on Threads, has asked about the prevalence of it. Is it possible to say where it was most prevalently used at all?
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
Like I say, it's very hard because we're not in the 1920s and 30s walking the streets to see where it was, you know, but I think certainly architecture, the numbers of buildings was not particularly great, but when they were built they made a huge impact. I think, particularly if you think of something like the Great West Road coming out of London, there was this basically enormous street of the world's most modern factories. Joseph Priestley writes about them at one point. And just, you know, they're gleaming factories, they're so different to anything that's gone before. So, so things like that would certainly have made a big, had a big impact. And I think cinemas, for example, the cinemas of the time, absolutely loved to be, you know, an art deco frontage because it made the whole thing look so glamorous. And when you walked in, it was a dream palace. It was incredibly luxurious and modern because of course the films, the talkies in particular, were so modern. So that was where it was very prevalent. And I've already mentioned posters, but. And it wasn't just the London Underground, but posters for all manner of goods and advertisements. They were in your newspapers, they were in your magazines, they were pasted on billboards and you were seeing this Modern style, wherever you looked. And this is a real period of increased visual literacy where people are understanding what the images represent more and more. They don't need something to be incredibly realistic. They're able to read into what that poster means. But I think as. As well as talking about its prevalence, I think it's really key here to talk about the impact it had on people, because it was in people's everyday lives. But the impact it had on people, I think, is it allowed people to start to dream for the first time again. Priestley writes about these girls who are dreaming of being Hollywood starlets. And part of the reason for that is this Art Deco dream. Like I said, you can buy into it. You know, you can buy this beautifully packaged lipstick or have little Art Deco compact, and you can dream and think you are a Hollywood star.
- [19:04]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
Yes, I think that seems to be the beginning of another listener question we've had. Max Quigley on Instagram has asked how the style reflected the social mood during and post World War I. And I guess that dream idea might be playing into that answer a little bit.
- [19:19]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
No, it absolutely does. I think the First World War was, I mean, just so disruptive. It's something, you know, we learn about, but we can't possibly comprehend. Each country, of course, has their own reaction during the war and then after the war, you know, and then we also have the Spanish flu, which kills millions as well. There's a lot of turmoil in these later teen years, so we can only sort of say this. This is very broad, sort of discussing how it, you know, impacts the mood. But broadly, people were sick and fed up of death and this destruction, and they didn't want it to happen again. And they start to try to do away with the old systems and orders that had brought this war about. And that comes across, you know, politically in Britain. We see new welfare bills brought in, we see the women's Suffra. We also see economics changing as well. More people are earning a salary. So the old order starts to break down slightly and people have this sense of optimism that things are going to change in the future. And, I mean, we hear about the bright young things and going out and, you know, having a, you know, a fantastic time and just there for the fun of it. Not everybody was like this, clearly. You know, these were really small number of people who reported on. And so I think it would be. It would be daft to think that everybody was like that, but there certainly was this sense of optimism and dreaming. And I think that's why Art deco The artists and designers creating all these Art Deco things captured this public imagination as well. I mean, they were very lucky that the two coincided. They were creating this modern art, but the public bought into it as well, because they wanted to dream. And I think a really good sort of concrete example of this would be the railway posters that were popping up in train stations all over Britain. The graphic designers came up with these incredibly modern, bold, escapist posters that encouraged people to travel more, you know, go away on holiday and things like that, and see different things. And this was the first time that many people had been able to do this. So they're really capturing the public's imagination and making it seem far more glamorous and wonderful than it really is. But, you know, they're really capturing the zeitgeist.
- [21:33]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
So if we've got the art, then inspiring the public and really capturing their imagination, is it fair to say that the artists themselves are also constantly drawing on stuff that's happening in tandem? We've got a great question here from Nicholas Sergis on Facebook, who has said. I've heard it said that the geometric patterns in Art Deco were inspired in part by ancient and classical motifs. He said, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Egypt, Greece, et cetera. What was going on in the world at that time that would have reignited this fascination with antiquity? And what was going on in the world world of archaeology that was inspiring these artists?
- [22:07]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
The great thing about these motifs is they do look very modern. But it wasn't just motifs as well. I have to, you know, the materials that were used as well, so marble and travertine were used extensively. And also things like columns were used in architecture, whether structural columns or, you know, just fake ones on the front of buildings. They really took from this classical idea of architecture. But in terms of archaeology and what was going on, on, it'd been professionalized, really, in the early 20th century. It wasn't just a gentleman's hobby anymore. So there was more and more going on. But not only that, I think that the biggest change is that you can see what's being dug up almost in real time, because communications are speeding up. You can get photographs in the newspaper just a couple of days after. So seeing things in your morning newspaper while you're eating your breakfast that haven't been seen for, you know, 4,000 years is really quite an inspiring thing. So archaeology was incredibly popular. I think you actually see it. This is slightly on a tangent from Art Deco, but you see how popular it was when you consider that Agatha Christie, who was Married to an archaeologist, was really interested in it herself. But she set some of her murder mysteries on archaeological digs. I mean, yes, she's a really popular writer, but the fact that her publishers are willing to let her do that and that the public laps them up, I really think shows the extent of this interest in archaeology. But if we go back to Art Deco, then the first time we really see archaeology having a real big impact on art and design in this period is the 1922 excavation of King Tut's tomb by Howard Carter and his team. And I mean, gosh, when this is uncovered even now, it's a phenomenal thing, but it sparks this Egyptomania or mania and everybody goes Egyptian crazy. And what Art Deco takes from that is the luxurious materials and the sort of the hieroglyphic style, geometric motifs that were in there. So it's used a lot in the. In the 1920s, this sort of Egyptian style. We also have classical Greek and Roman influences coming through. And part of this is because the architecture is fairly mathematical and linear and it's very pleasing to the eye. It's got a lot of symmetry and linear. But there are also myths coming through from Greek and Roman cultures. So if we take 55 Broadway, which is the London Underground HQ, there are sculptures of the four winds sitting near the top of it. And these are very modern renderings of the Greek myths based around the characters of the four winds. They're actually done by Eric Gill and Henry Moore and they are so far away from classical design, but yet they're inspired by it. And, you know, and that's where Art Deco moves these classical influences onwards. If we look to America in particular, we get Mexican, Aztec, Inca influences coming through as well. So, again, these geometric patterns, ziggurats, triangles, which are really striking and simple in themselves, but not only that, for the Americans, they have this wish to have their own ancient past as well in this period. So they're a bit sick and fed up of taking you just European influences, the Greeks and the Romans. So the fact that they've got their own ancient past that they can take is really quite fascinating to them. But because it's not particularly well understood, it's a fairly recent sort of discovery and study, what they pull out tends to be a complete hotchpotch. So you'll find cinemas that are a complete mishmash of Mesoamerican styles, but it creates a sort of sense of fantasy. I mean, I don't know whether today it would be almost politically correct to take all these Things and just shove them together. But they really did and created some fantastical buildings and things.
- [26:11]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
Yes. Resulted in really striking architecture and so on. And you've talked a lot about lines and geometry. We do have a question about a very specific motif in Art Deco from a listener, Philippa Stevens, on Instagram. They have asked, what are speed lines specifically? And can you tell us a bit more about these and why they're important in this movement?
- [26:32]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
No, absolutely. Speed lines are pretty much what they say on the tin, happily. They show speed and movement normally in images, but also in sculpture. And the reason they're there is because Art Deco is embracing modernity. And if you think of what is modern in the early 20th century, one of the biggest things is transport. Trains are going faster, people are starting to own cars, Some lucky people are starting to fly on the first commercial airlines, and there's people traveling across the Atlantic as fast as they possibly can. So transport particularly embraces Art Deco, and Art Deco embraces transport. Another really key motif in Art Deco is movement. And so dancers are a really key sort of thing that figure a lot, particularly in sculpture, actually. So with transports, you've got this sort of. It's almost a triumvirate of. It's showing movements and it's showing modernity and it's showing sleek lines that Art Deco thrives off. And I think that's why speed lines are so important. Transport's so important in Art Deco.
- [27:44]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
We've got a real sense then of this kinetic energy, this modernity. It's really influencing this movement. There are obviously other movements at the time. We've got a couple of questions, listener questions on the same thing, really. Diana Kaiser and Holly Dolly Duda on Instagram have both asked about Art Nouveau and how it's different from that. For any listeners who aren't familiar, could you briefly introduce this and then the differences as well?
- [28:08]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm no expert on Art Nouveau. It's a period slightly before. It runs from roughly the 1890s to the outbreak of the First World War. But as with Art Deco, these things do not just stop on this day and then a new movement starts. The two movements do overlap, and Art Nouveau certainly influences Art Deco. The main difference is the style. So Art Nouveau takes a lot of influence from nature, and it uses very sinuous lines, it's very detailed, far more realistic, as opposed to Art Deco, which, as we keep saying, is geometric, square, you know, very sleek, lined. So if you put an Art Deco piece next to an Art Nouveau, you'd Know the difference. Difference straight away. There were similarities, though, because the aims of those involved in the Art Nouveau movement was to try and start embracing commercialism. So in the Victorian period, when things were becoming more commercialized, art was still very, very separate. Art was normally painted and then put in a museum or a gallery. And the idea that an artist would lower themselves to go and paint a mural on the inside of a train station or design for or a ceramics factory, it just. I mean, it just wasn't done. And so in our Art Nouveau people, the artists start to think, well, surely this art should be available to everybody and let's broaden it out and start to make beautiful things available for lots of people. So we get things like Tiffany lamps and there's, you know, beautiful silver teapots that are just so incredibly intricate and elegant or, you know, wrought iron railings. So everything is very detailed and. But unfortunately, because it was so intricate and detailed, it didn't make itself particularly well suited to mass production. So it sort of failed in its aims. And so Art Deco picks up from Art Nouveau, really, and moves these aims on and it says, well, you can't produce something so intricate in a factory. That's not what factories do. We've got this new form of art which looks great and modern and also it's very easy to replicate in a factory. And I think that's the real difference. You know, Art Nouveau have the idea of making art available to the masses, but it's the Art Deco movement that really pushes it forward. And like I say, the two are definitely linked. I mean, if you look at the 1925 Exposition in Paris, for example, the work there, particularly the French things that were on display were just the craftsmanship in it, the luxurious nature of the materials used, you'd almost be putting them into the Art Nouveau category. Was it not that they were looking so very different. So, like I say, there's not a definite date where Art Nouveau becomes Art Deco.
- [31:07]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, thank you for that explanation and hearing you talk so passionately about this movement and in such broad terms as. Well, I imagine this next question might be a bit tricky, but I wonder if you could give some of your. Your personal favourites of examples of Art Deco of this movement.
- [31:22]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
I came to Art Deco, really because I was fascinated by the fashion illustrations. I've always been interested in sewing and I started finding these old dress patterns and, gosh, the illustrations were so beautiful. And I looked at old magazines and there was. The fashion illustrations just had this elegance and this otherworldliness that just you know, completely entranced me and. And that's completely unrealistic. The women in them were at one point termed puppet ladies because they didn't look anything like normal women. But I think that's part of their charm for me, anyway. So I would really, for me, have to go with fashion illustrations that appear in magazines and on the front of sewing patterns and things like that. And at the moment, I'm in heaven because the project I'm working on at the moment requires me to read lots of vogues from the 1920s and 30s, which. Which is just wonderful.
- [32:17]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
Well, I can't say I'm not envious of that aspect of your job. That sounds absolutely wonderful. I wonder if people do want to see any more examples, obviously, beyond going to literature of the time and seeing the designs on the page and things like that. Where else can things still be seen? I appreciate there might be glimpses here and there. Any of your favourites?
- [32:37]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
You can spot Art Deco architecture, actually on your local high street. I think this is, you know, this is how broad ranging it is. So. And then 1920s and 30s, the new chain stores were starting to build their own stores and they used a lot of Art Deco. So actually, if you're walking along your high street and you just look up above the signage, you might encounter an old Marks and Spencers, Woolworths, Burtons, they were the key ones. So, you know, you don't actually need to go far to see Art Deco. Like you say, the VA has got an amazing collection of things. Scotland actually has a great selection of Art Deco buildings and there are other things that have touched on the London Underground a lot. It really did embrace Art Deco, so they have a lot of material. They've got a great collection online that you can browse through. I think almost everything you touch. If you look at something from the 1920s and 30s, you're going to see some form of Art Deco in it. And I think you can see its influence today as well. I think that's the most important thing. It really did change art completely and there are so many influences of it coming through today. It's gone through the doldrums, but it's come out the other side. And even the tub chairs that you go and sit in in a nice restaurant, they're inspired by art.
- [33:47]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
Dec. Yeah, I could definitely see that sort of legacy before we go into a little bit more of it and perhaps wrap up with its legacy today 100 years or so on. We've got a question From Fearcoat on Instagram. Touching on what you can see today is do we know of any spectacular buildings that were lost before they could become listed? So stuff that we just won't be able to see today because they've been lost to time?
- [34:09]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
Yeah, absolutely. And I have to thank someone for this. Angarad Hart sits on the. She's the chair of the Preservation Committee, the Art Deco Society, and she's taught me an awful lot about this. She's a specialist in architecture and I certainly am not. So she's been teaching me things along the way the last few months. There are definitely things that have been lost. I think one that most listeners will know about is the Marks and Spencers on Oxford street. That's just been slated for demolition. It's going to happen now and it might not seem like very much to a lot of people, it's just a big shop, but actually, in terms of its retail architecture, it's incredibly important. It's an Art Deco building and it's is one of those first buildings where public consumption and arts really meet. And I think that's why it's so very important. And of course, it's on a grand scale. It's all very well me saying there are Marks and Spencers up and down on your local high street, but this Oxford street one is a huge example of it, and physically huge in terms of other very prominent buildings that have been lost. There is the Firestone factory, which is on the Great West Road going out of London. That was an office block, which was more like an Egyptian temple, to be honest, than an office block. It was covered in Egyptian motifs. It was inspired by the gods. But Firestone, who made tyres, closed that down in 1979. A new owner decided they didn't want the factory anymore. And while people were still battling to have this building listed and saved, they knocked it down over a bank holiday, which did not particularly go down well. All that's left today are the. The perimeter walls and the gate. And I used to drive past them and not really know what it was. This is before I knew anything about Art Deco. And I used to be fascinated by these gates and think, gosh, what on earth used to be there? So, yep, that's been lost. Cinemas actually up and down the country have been lost. Like I say, cinemas were one of the big users of Art Deco architecture. And just as people stopped wanting to go to these older cinemas, they wanted multiplexes, they were out of town and parking and things like that. So a lot of those have gone there's. One particular example, the Rio in Sheerness, which had this beautiful curved front, all made out of Portland stone. It had a fin up the centre and it had a lookout tower on the top. It was really. It almost looks like something out in the 1950s and the 1930s. It was incredible, but that was lost. But I think in terms of not losing things in the future, a lot of this stuff that is 1920s and 30s architecture that is left, it's been abandoned because it's deemed no longer fit for purpose. And because it's been abandoned, it looks a bit grotty and grubby, slightly rusty, and it's lost its glamour. So people don't want to save it because it doesn't look good at the moment. But I think actually there's. With a bit of TLC and repurposing, these buildings are legacy, you know, of this incredible flourishing of creativity in the interwar period. And, you know, I think we really need to consider what we are knocking down. Just because it's not, you know, suitable at the moment or to a particular take does not mean it shouldn't be there.
- [37:18]
Eleanor Evans (Interviewer)
Yes, thank you very much for that reflection. And I think that after listening to this episode, I'm sure a few more listeners will be looking upwards and maybe spotting little bits that they hadn't seen before and knowing that it's a call back to this time of interwar looking towards modernity. Thank you so much for taking us through this history in a brilliant fashion Today, obviously we're 100 years or so on from this movement. Is there anything we haven't covered today or any final thoughts you'd like to leave our listeners with as we to want wrap up?
- [37:46]
Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
There is so much we haven't covered. I mean, this is a really brief introduction. Like I say, it's an enormous area and I would just encourage anyone who's interested in Art Deco to explore it a little bit more. I think what I have found most interesting about other Art Deco enthusiasts is everybody has their own little niche. Like, you know, for example, I'm really interested in the artwork, but I have a friend who's very interested in how Cosmos Cosmetics were packaged up and sold and things like that. I have other people very much interested in the architecture, so there's a little bit of Art Deco for everyone and there are some great books out there that you know and they are beautifully illustrated. That's the shame about this podcast, is that I can't show you all of the beautiful things that are Art Deco. So absolutely go out and explore and find some pictures and. Yeah, and hopefully enjoy it. Art Deco is supposed to be joyful and if you can't take that away for a bit, then.
- [38:41]
History Extra Podcast Host
That was Emma Baston, historian of the early 20th century. As you heard, Emma wrote about the hundredth anniversary of Art Deco for the August issue of BBC History magazine and you can find her feature online and in the History Extra app, free to members. She was speaking to Eleanor Evans.
- [39:01]
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Emma Bastin (Historian and Art Deco Expert)
Oh, come on.
- [39:14]
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