Customer Reviews

Christie's Art Deco

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Christie's Art Deco, edited by Fiona Gallagher, is an excellent overview of the Art Deco period with highlights of the major designers of each category with innovations in the respective fields of design. It is written in a scholarly narrative text. Categories included are architectural detailing, furniture, glass, ceramics, silver and metalware, jewelry, sculpture, and graphics/posters. It has 192 pages with approximately 120 color photographs and an excellent bibliography given for further research. It is an excellent choice for a wide range of readers with an interest in the decorative arts.

Overall, I thought this was an enormously attractive, informative book. The many crisply-photographed images seem to have been selected with care, myriad interesting and attractive Art Deco pieces. The text covered a great deal of specific Art Deco-era designers and their works with great comprehensiveness. Expect primer, not only on major artists and key pieces, but also on the companies for which these artists worked, the expositions at which they exhibited, and the schools to which they belonged (as well as a bit about the related political and social climates of the time.)

My only problem with the book arises from the selection and arrangement of its images. Although there are lots of wonderful photos, only a handful of them seem to actually be mentioned in the text (the rest I assume are of pieces that have been in Christie's possession over the years.) The few images that ARE mentioned in the book are seldom anywhere near the place in the text where they're mentioned, so I had read well over a quarter of the book before I realized that I had the opportunity to actually SEE some of the things being talked about. Even a note telling the reader where a photo of the object could be located would have been useful.

Nevertheless, it's a wonderful book that I highly recommend for both the casual and serious Deco enthusiast alike. Knowing that there are some images of a few of the objects mentioned in the text, however, will enrich your reading experience noticeably.

In 1930, William Van Alen (architect of New York's Chrysler Building) invented his Art Deco design to embody the spirit of his age when art was expected to be higher, faster, and more dynamic than was to be found in any prior age. Superbly illustrated with images drawn from the Christie's archives, and enhanced with commentaries by Michael Jeffery, Simon Andrews, and Nicolette White, Christie's Art Deco is an informative as it is beautiful, complete capturing the dynamic essence of an art style that defined an era with everything from Japanese ceramics to Swiss poster designs to French glass to American architect, and more. Highly recommended for art history students, art deco collectors and connoisseurs, as well as anyone with an eye for enduring beauty, Christie's Art Deco is enriched with collector's tips, a glossary, museum addresses, Christie's addresses, a select bibliography for further study, and a very helpful index.