Style of the highest achievements: art deco in pictures, descriptions and reasoning.

     The new edition tells about the genesis and various aspects of this international style in a bright and intelligible way. Including examples from the Soviet era, about which it is not completely clear whether we had our art deco or not.

An incredibly popular style, including in Russia, Art Deco is probably the main artistic embodiment of hedonism in modern culture. Its elements from time to time regain relevance in fashion, interior design and even construction, but the vast majority of publications about it are translated.

Until now, the only fundamental study of this topic in Russia remains “Formula of style. Art Deco: Origins, Regional Options, Features of Evolution” by Tatyana Malinina, who examines in detail the French and American versions of the style, as well as the question of the existence of its Soviet counterpart. All other publications focused on different aspects of the same topic. For example, on the relationship between Art Deco and modernist art movements in France.

All the more important is the attempt made by the historian of architecture Ilya Pechenkin to summarize the data on the genesis of the style, the specifics of its regional variants and return to the myth of Soviet Art Deco. The popular-science nature of the publication works here only as a plus: it seems that the author has found an intonation that allows him to tell not only about a phenomenon in the history of art, but also, more broadly, about the era between the two world wars. “The Art Deco phenomenon is inseparable from the history of the achievements of the past century, which opened up a new understanding of space (with the help of ocean liners, aeronautics, trains and cars), overcame the gravity of the earth (simultaneously through high-rise structures, zeppelins and airplanes), realized the globality of civilization and the utopian idea of ​​progress ”, writes Pechenkin in the introductory part of the book.

In the first chapter, he notes the multiplicity and internationality of the origins of style; in the second, he describes in detail the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, which gave the name to the style itself; the third talks about how the achievements presented at that exhibition ended up in the United States the very next year. Further, Pechenkin discusses how, despite the ideological incompatibility and lack of social ground for art deco in the USSR (a style that arose as an artist’s union with an industrialist and merchant in the name of glorifying the ideas of comfort and luxury), its elements nevertheless penetrated Soviet architecture and partly into painting.

Separate cuts in the book are devoted to various aspects of the artistic culture of the era: fashion illustration by Roman Tyrtov (Erte) and the art of the “ancestor of glamor” Tamara Lempicka, cinema, jazz, fashion and other phenomena. Ilya Pechenkin’s observation that Art Deco is “extremely problematic to consider a style in the classical sense is very important: the palette of forms, techniques, plots and materials involved is too wide, the structure and hierarchy of this style is too indefinable.” He suggests talking about a special taste “for the geometric purity of a large form, the monumentality of which was additionally emphasized by an exquisitely delicate ornament; contrasting juxtaposition of polished surfaces with a variety of textures and inlays.