The Routledge Companion to Art Deco

Bridget Elliott, Michael Windover, Bridget Elliott, Michael Windover

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429627408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Scholarly interest in Art Deco has grown rapidly over the past fifty years, spanning different academic disciplines. This volume provides a guide to the current state of the field of Art Deco research by highlighting past accomplishments and promising new directions. Chapters are presented in five sections based on key concepts: migration, public culture, fashion, politics, and Art Deco's afterlife in heritage restoration and new media. The book provides a range of perspectives on and approaches to these issues, as well as to the concept of Art Deco itself. It highlights the slipperiness of Art Deco yet points to its potential to shed new light on the complexities of modernity.

Part I

Migration and the making of North American Art Deco

1

The legacy of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the formation of North American Deco

Academic and social tenets and their interpretations

Isabelle Gournay

In cities as far afield as Brussels, Tunis, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, and Shanghai, the diaspora of architects classically trained at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts orchestrated, popularized, and interpreted Art Deco with elegance and panache. ¹ The translation of Beaux-Arts design tenets and professional strategies into Art Deco work was particularly instrumental in the US. Beyond France, this country hosted the largest contingent of architects “anciens élèves” of what Americans simply called “the Ecole”; such a title was earned by passing its exacting entrance examinations and, until the 1930s, garnered significant prestige among North American clients and public opinion.

The legacy of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the formation of North American Deco finds its most iconic illustration in the well-known photograph of the unflappable William Van Alen dressed as his Chrysler Building, holding center stage at the 1931 Beaux-Arts Ball, an annual fundraiser for the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. A highpoint in the history of Art Deco pageantry, this Fête Moderne was orchestrated by members of the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects (SBAA) and attended by New York’s high society (Pope 1931). Van Alen had won the SBAA’s Paris Prize in 1908, spending two and half years at the Ecole, winning medal after medal in “first class” design competitions or concours. His student work does not directly anticipate the Chrysler Building’s magnificent décor or the curved glazing of his long-demolished storefronts. ² Nonetheless, it demonstrates how Van Alen reveled in what Ecole professor Julien Guadet—whose Eléments et Théorie de l’Architecture of 1901–1904 will help us define Ecole tenets applicable to Art Deco—deplored as the “disease” of “énorme de concours” (Guadet 1902 vol. 1, 190). Overscaling, however, proved a tremendous asset in 1920s Manhattan.

This essay relates to a larger study of the combined design acumen and social leverage of the “Beaux-Arts architect” in the US and Canada. It entails more than 500 men (and one woman, Julia Morgan) who were officially enrolled in the Ecole’s architecture section between 1846, when Richard Morris Hunt was admitted, and 1939. US admissions reached their peak between 1895 and 1908 (Gournay Crosnier Leconte 2013, 156). Their transcripts are available online (Dictionnaire n.d.). Unexplored personal and academic archives have also been consulted to expand our understanding of the “Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.” Such was the title of the epochal exhibition held in 1975 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (a smaller version traveled to Ottawa’s National Gallery of Art) and of its equally influential companion publication. From the collections of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, curator Arthur Drexler selected drawings exquisitely drafted by French élèves, all predating 1907. He also gave pride of place to Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House. Opened in 1875, this dashing structure was the harbinger for a new semi-Classical, semi-Baroque idiom which, by the 1890s, was acclimated to the US by “Beaux-Arts men,” such as Ernest Flagg (Navy Academy, Annapolis) and Whitney Warren (New York Yacht Club). This idiom—which also characterized Van Alen’s Ecole work—was labeled, by its contemporary practitioners and detractors alike, “Modern French.” Both inside and outside, it combined fantasy and monumentality, expounding bold massing and magnifying decorative elements, all future tenets of Art Deco. Today, it is lumped together with what the media, and even well-intentioned preservationists, call, without precise definitions, the “Beaux-Arts Style.”

Steadily produced since the 1980s, publications on Ecole-trained architects in North America still amount to the tip of the Beaux-Arts iceberg. They rarely delve in detail on the Paris experience of their protagonists. ³ For students who were in attendance before the late 1890s, it is challenging to relate Ecole work to subsequent professional output. Not until then did commercial publishers—Farge, Guérinet, and Vincent & Fréal—regularly and extensively issue annual volumes which illustrated a much larger spectrum of premiated submissions than those (all for the first class, with the exception of the concours de construction) which the Ecole preempted for its drawing collection. If many Americans and Canadians came back with a slim transcript, most of those who would produce Deco work were excellent students, whose Ecole work surfaces in print, at the Ecole itself and in North American archives. Until turning 30, and even after having been granted the diplôme (the equivalent of today’s M. Arch thesis), an élève could continue entering competitions. Achieving a much greater number of credits than those required by official regulations became a matter of pride for many students as well as for their design critics; pressure to achieve success (and consequently published evidence of school work) was particularly strong among pre-war Paris Prize winners and Frenchmen awarded scholarships by their city or départements: the latter included Paul Cret, Léon Arnal, and Jacques Carlu, all mentioned below (Gournay 2018), who were hired by US architecture schools on the strength of their Ecole record. ⁴

In North America, Deco works by Paris-trained architects encompass an extensive geographic, formal, and programmatic spectrum. Hosting the greatest cohort of anciens élèves and the largest cosmopolitan clientele in North America, New York City led the pack. Regional variations were few, with the exception of the French-speaking Quebec, where the provincial government mandated French architects to head full-fledge Schools of Fine Arts in both Montreal and Quebec City. In Paris, the post-war architectural cohort hailing from these schools was significant, while the US contingent was dwindling due to the acclimation of Beaux-Arts methods and import of French critics into many schools of architecture. The Ecole-induced import of religious Art Deco from France (a striking blend of Ecole theatrics and Expressionism, as exemplified by Tourville’s Saint-Jean-Berchmans in Montréal) was also unique to Catholic Quebec.

In terms of architecture, neither French nor North American Art Deco boasted self-anointed leaders or theorists. On either the side of the Atlantic Ocean, it was practiced by a constellation of protagonists. Table 1.1 lists, by date of admission to the Ecole, designers of landmarks cited in key surveys of US and Canadian Deco, with the years of their official registration or final diplôme. This chart also accounts for the Ecole pedigree and key Deco work of some of their French classmates. This impressive Gallic roster includes two well-known ensembliers, Eric Bagge and Michel Dufet, both excellent students at the Ecole, as well as designers having placed first to third in the Ecole’s ultimate contest, the Prix de Rome, which was reserved for French citizens. The chart’s column indicating the name of the professor whom each élève was free to select, is also illuminating. Recurrent chefs d’atelier are Victor Laloux, the architect of the Gare d’Orsay, and Jean-Louis Pascal, who both took a real liking to their American students, as well as Gaston Redon. ⁵ The atelier run by Henri Deglane hosted the greatest number of Americans but mostly produced tradition-bound designers, such as Francis Burrall Hoffman, David Adler, and Archibald Manning Brown. The chart also indicates whom, among older French students, a North American newcomer could look up to for advice and continue to “follow” upon his return.

Table 1.1 List of Beaux-Arts-trained architects and their key Deco works in France, the US, and Canada.

	Ecole tenure	Chef d’atelier	Art Deco work (demolished/extent)
Charles Letrosne (1868–1939)	diplômé 1894	Raulin	Sporting Club d’Hiver, Monte-Carlo, 1928
André Arfvidson (1870–1935)	1er Second Grand Prix de Rome 1898	GinainScellier de Gisors	Hôtel Prince de Galles, Paris, 1929National City Bank, Paris, 1931
Auguste Bluysen (1868–1952)	diplômé 1897	Redon	Grand Rex, Paris, 1932
Charles Duval (1873–1937)	diplômé 1898	Pascal	Numerous churches
Léon Jaussely (1875–1932)	1er Grand Prix de Rome 1903	Daumet Esquié	Dépêche du Midi, Toulouse, 1932
Charles Lemaresquier (1870–1972)	diplômé 1897	La...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What’s the use of style? The case of Art Deco
• PART I Migration and the making of North American Art Deco
• PART II Art Deco and public culture
• PART III Fusing art and fashion
• PART IV The politics of Art Deco
• PART V History, conservation, and reincarnation
• Index
• Plates