Art Decco/Art Moderne

Another of the styles that heavily influenced P.P.S. was Art Decco

"Luxurious, international style of decoration that flourished c. 1918-39 in fashion, interiors, architecture, ceramics and industrial design. Named after the 1925 World's Fair in Paris ('Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderns'). Utilized bright, vibrant colors along with a distinctive range of motifs - floral, figurative and geometric. Sources go back to early 20th c., when designers were searching for an alternative to the overwhelming influence of Art Nouveau and its reliance on curvilinear forms. In graphic design Art Deco was less ornate than in other fields but displayed a strong emphasis on striking geometric shapes and patterns. The bold rectilinear typefaces of the period, which provided improved legibility, were in stark contrast to the florid creations of Art Nouveau. Artists like A.M. Cassandre in France and E. McKnight Kauffer in England created posters of great originality and exuberance, with the lettering carefully intergrated as an important graphic element. (The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers, 19)

"Even prior to the war, leaders of French graphic, furniture, and product design began to develop a new national style to replace their old Art Nouveau - a new strategy that sought to combine a classical elegance with the eccentric madness of Art Nouveau into a stunning hybrid that was at once modern and futuristic (Illustration a Visual History, 53)."

"...it was a decidedly decorative approach to the human form that simplified and stylized all physical objects to inject them with an aura of streamlined elegance. While the aesthetic was most prevalent in poster, furniture, product, and packaging design, as well as in architecture, illustration conformed to the basic Deco tenets, too. For the most part, the style relied on patterns made up of reductive ornamentation. The airbrush was the defining tool - although other drawing and painting media were commonly used - becuase it enabled artists to create textures made from line, mass, and shadow. These textures had a smooth veneer that evoked a sense of motion. The airbrush was used to soften the hard edges, resulting in modeled, sculptural rendering (Illustration a Visual History, 53-55)."

"Deco was an immediaty identifiable graphic code - an amazingly popular international style - that telegraphed sophistication and contemorariness, and was hence used to sell goods to both high and low customers. Although rarely more than an ornamental approach to art, Deco offered some of its practitioners the opportunity to experiment by pushing the limits of picture making. In particular, the Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero stood out for his wildly colorful abstract imagery on the covers for Vanity Fair and various Italian journals. Art Deco remained vogue for almost two decades until the austerity binge of World War II made this look of extravagance seem superfluous to world crises. It was nonetheless revived a decade after the war and continues to be a presence in commercial art, if only as pastiche. Art Deco was the first commercial design style to emerge simultaneously in almost every industrialized nation. It was also an attempt to give the bourgeoisie contemporary flair and thus resuscitate flailing sales of consumables. Later, it was a lively alternative to austere, orthodox Modern design, combining the aesthetics of Mayan, Egyptian, and Asian motifs with twentieth-century European avant-garde idioms of Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Russian Constructivism (Illustration a Visual History, 55-58)."