CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/21/2015

Modern Taste

Jean Dupas' poster for the XVème Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, 1924, is reproduced from Modern Taste: Art Deco in Paris 1910-1935. In his chapter, Art Deco: Style and Meaning, Tim Benton writes, "This was the Zeitgeist premise: architecture and design should change radically because the world had been dramatically altered by the arrival of industrialization. Modernist architects and designers all over Europe invariably made use of this argument. But there was a counter-argument: that the horrors of the modern world required that artists separate themselves from contingency and create an autonomous, disinterested work which allowed them to achieve an elevated spiritual satisfaction… This argument is the epistemological issue of the relationship between the material world and the realm of the imagination, or between body and spirit. Does the one determine the other? Most people would have reservations about this. Curiously, many supporters of Art Deco deployed this argument in favor of decorative art."