Specials S. Series

Decorative Arts

by Charlotte Fiell and Peter Fiell

Published 27 October 2000

Taschen's Decorative Art series, whose six installments now span the 20th century up through the 1970s, carefully reproduces the best of Studio Magazine's Decorative Art yearbook. Published annually from 1906 until 1980, the yearbook was dedicated to the latest currents in architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting, glassware, textiles, metalware, and ceramics. Since the publication went out of print, the now hard-to-find yearbooks have become highly prized by collectors and dealers. So how can the rest of us have a look? Taschen, of course! Preserving the yearbooks' original page layouts, Taschen's new Decorative Art books bring you an authentic experience of each decade's design trends and styles. Collect them all!

This new installment in Taschen's Decorative Art series takes us back to the Roaring Twenties, a time of great optimism and technological progress which saw the birth of new materials and styles in building and design. The Art Deco movement, a great departure from Art Nouveau, surfaced in the early 20s, drawing influences from Futurism, Cubism, Neo-Classicism, and Egyptian and African Art. While Art Deco, flaunting excess and luxury, largely dominated the style of the 1920s, another new movement, Modernism, began to make itself known towards the end of the decade. For the first time, materials such as concrete, plate glass, and tubular metal were beginning to appear; following the dictum ""form follows function,"" utilitarian simplicity and classic geometry were the Modernists' driving principles, as seen in the work of Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van de Rohe, to name a few.

Moving from the spirit of the Jazz Age to the cool simplicity of LeCorbusier's early ""machines for living,"" Decorative Art 1920s is a fabulous tour through the groundbreaking innovations of interior design and architecture in the century's wildest decade.