How Jazz, Flappers, European Émigrés, Booze and Cigarettes Transformed Design
Muse with Violin Screen, 1930. Rose Iron Works, Inc. Paul Feher, designer.
“The Jazz Age” brings to mind flappers, Gatsby, epic parties, and, of course jazz. But if high energy defined the era, so did its tension—the wild nightlife scene met with Prohibition; a rapid rise in American innovation conflicted with a longing for European tradition; great prosperity gave way to the Great Depression. The friction of all these contradictions shaped the century that followed—in popular design perhaps more than in any other area of American life.
These contrasting influences and the important role they played in the 1920s are the subject of an expansive new show, “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,” the first major museum exhibition to look squarely at American style during this creatively combustible era.
Doors for the Music Room of Mr. and Mrs. Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1925-26; designed by Seraphin Soudbinine, executed by Jean Dunand (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum).
The show, which runs through August 20 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and is co-organized with the Cleveland Museum of Art, spotlights this significant era when American taste and lifestyle underwent a transformation. Reflected in the furnishings, jewelry and design of the period, this was an era where boundaries were being tested, and in some cases breached.
“It’s the source of so much that happens in the 30s and beyond,” says Sarah Coffin, a Cooper Hewitt curator and head of product design and decorative arts.
The more than 400 works of jewelry, fashion, architecture, furniture, textiles and more paint a picture of a wildly energetic era of design, emboldened by vivid color and innovation. To navigate such a huge subject, the show is organized over two floors into broad themes that help illustrate the major design trends and tensions shaping the era.
Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge, 1919-20 (Yale University Gallery)
“You first gather the universe of objects, which is many more than you can show,” says Stephen Harrison, curator of decorative art and design from the Cleveland Museum of Art, describing the winnowing process that the show’s organizers first faced. “Then you begin to ask yourself: What questions do they pose? What adjacencies? What relationships develop? And as we began to refine our ideas we refined our objects.”
The first theme that visitors encounter is perhaps the one they might least expect: “Persistence of Traditional Good Taste.”
Read the full story at Smithsonian.