Art Deco from the National Collection

Touring Dates and Venues

Art Deco from the National Collection: The World Turns Modern touring exhibition was supported by the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program, an Australian Government program aiming to improve access to the national collections for all Australians.

• Tweed Regional Gallery, NSW
  31 May – 25 August 2019
• Ipswich Art Gallery, QLD
  7 September – 27 October 2019
• Horsham Regional Art Gallery, VIC
  16 November 2019 – 1 February 2020
• Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, NSW
  29 August – 8 November 2020

Art Deco in design and daily life

Art Deco as a style in art, architecture and design emerged alongside modernism and abstraction in the early decades of the twentieth century. Technological advancements such as electricity, motor cars and air travel, combined with social changes such as urbanisation, called for a new style that mirrored the modern world. With its simplified forms, bright colours and dynamic lines, Art Deco provided the right aesthetic for the times. Buildings were stripped of elaborate embellishments, fashion became less structured, and women, who began to enjoy greater freedoms, appeared in portraiture, advertisements and graphic design as stylish, independent and optimistic.

As an international style, Art Deco reached its apogee at the Paris International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. Dedicated to ‘modern’ decorative arts, influential architects conceived pavilions that were filled with cornucopias of modernist and Art Deco design. In Australia, the style reached audiences in magazines such as The Home, which illustrated many of the objects, photographs and advertisements on display in this exhibition.

Among works that show the ways in which Australian artists embraced, adapted and advanced the Art Deco style are selected international examples, including a vivid red tea service, the Tea set c.1928 by the German-born Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein. One of the first women to enter the prestigious Bauhaus ceramic workshop, she fought stridently for the right to do so in four separate applications to Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, who deemed the workshop suitable for male students only.

Heymann-Loebenstein later founded the Haël Werkstätten for Artistic Ceramics in 1923 in Marwitz, Germany with her economist husband Gustav Loebenstein and his brother. When the brothers died in a car accident, Margarete took over the factory, supervised its 120 staff, and oversaw an expansive export business that placed her designs in department stores all over the world, including Australia.

Art Deco began as an opulent expression of French luxury and ended with the mass production of international modern consumables. A fluid and resilient style, it evolved and survived significant cultural, political and technological changes, enduring the First World War, subsequent nation rebuilding, and the Great Crash of 1929. Optimistic and exuberant in the face of catastrophe, the Art Deco era is evoked by the closing stanza of W.H. Auden’s 1936 poem Death’s Echo, that implores its reader to ‘Dance till the stars come down from the rafters; Dance, dance, dance till you drop’.

Art Deco painting, prints and sculpture

While Art Deco design and popular culture embodied urbane sophistication, an equally prominent trajectory evolved from an increased interest in Theosophy, spirituality and symbolism. Following the First World War, artists looked to metaphysical and mythological concepts to ease anguish and despair. Australian painter Rupert Bunny, who emigrated to France in the nineteenth century, responded to the European interest in mythology and produced a colourful jewel-like group of mythological and allegorical paintings in the 1920s. Art Deco from the National Collection: The world turns modern features several of these paintings including The Fountain of Venus c.1921, Peleus and Thetis c.1920, and The Prophetic Nymphs c.1919–20 who could envisage the future by casting stones.

In Australia, this strand of Art Deco style converged with an impulse to portray an abundant and productive nation after the austerity of the First World War. Although depictions of the human form were often pared back, an archetype of strong and youthful individuals evolved into a style called ‘Vitalism’ that envisaged subjects in classical Greek and Roman myths. For example, Jean Broome-Norton’s Woman with horses 1934 depicts the Amazonian Queen Hippolyta’s keeper of horses. New version: For example, Jean Broome-Norton’s Woman with horses 1934 depicts the Amazonian Queen Hippolyta’s keeper of horses. Wrangling two wild and rearing beasts, she is a woman of intense energy and strength. As a student, Broome-Norton trained in Sydney under Rayner Hoff, who was intensely interested in the idea of vitalism, the belief that life was self-determining, and that human kind had the power to indelibly shape its existence.

In Melbourne, husband and wife Christian and Napier Waller lived and worked according to an aesthetic vision that coalesced craftsmanship, mysticism and spiritual philosophies including Theosophy. In Napier Waller’s remarkable painting Christian Waller with Baldur, Undine and Siren at Fairy Hills 1932, Christian sits serenely on the lawns of their Arts and Crafts-style home in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe.

Wearing an ethereal ivory dress, she clasps a coral-coloured necklace resembling prayer beads in one hand, and what appears as a sacred text in the other. The couple’s beloved Airedale Terriers are her disciples. In the studio of their Fairy Hills home, Christian Waller made one of the masterpieces of Art Deco-era printing, The Great Breath: a book of seven designs 1932, which is included in this exhibition. Made by her hand alone, she undertook all elements of its creation, even hand-stitching and binding her designs in covers of bright emerald green cloth. Portraying man’s evolution through seven stages as detailed by modern Theosophy, Waller draws together various visual influences based on mystical and occultist ideas. Marrying ancient Greek, Egyptian, astrological and Medieval imagery, Waller’s archaic source material resulted in a strikingly modern visual language.