Art Deco,
1920 to 1940, with its centre somewhere in between.
savvy! fizz! buzz! boogie! jive! zip! zap! zigzag! jizz! jazz! groove! broke! flush! whizz! bang! whambang! fast! breeze! booze! plastered! cool! hot! ace! snazzy! dish! doll! babe! dame! flapper! looker! doozy! gladrags! ritzy! dazzle! swank! swell! spiv! sugar-daddy! nuts! bananas! riot! whoopee!
You use all those words? You're in! You're cool! You dig Art Deco! You've read Frank Scott Fitzgerald? Well read him again! And the others.
All Scott's drop dead beautiful prose and all the other books and illustrations and music of the post-war, pre-war ERA are a window for us, who long for a brief escape from the mechanised 21st century, on the 20th century, which roared into life as if there was no tomorrow and people knew there was no time to waste, that they must live life fast and furious before the banking clouds, portentious and dark, occulted the sunburst of this favoured era and the evil war came to kill its joy.
Buy this disc! You deserve it! Treat yourself! This is a sunburst of hurried art where everything was allowed but where, at the same time, all but essentials were dispensed with, but new inessentials were created mischievously, the likes of the ubiquitous foppish monocled dude in a tuxedo at the wheels of some outrageous chrome-plated car as a backdrop for all the frothy party chicks with savannah eyes in chaste sequinned dresses of beautiful natural fabrics: organdy, organza, lawn, voile and taffeta.
Imagination went riotous in forms and colours to suit, like an 8 year old child with a new box of colour paints, and the artistes and artists of the era were impishly hellbent,and remember hell means light, on zapping the beholders, on waking and surprising them and so desperate to please. Look here! You like what you see? Here is how we were, quaffing fizzies and guzzling cake. Flaunting their dreams!
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Already the Art Deco Era was dying and artists were forgetting how to draw, and already that degeneration was seeding and the new "modernism" was lapping the edges of art-deco like a fungal parasite but as yet not thriving. An inborn talent and calling would soon no longer be necessary. Matisse could draw a neat triangle, even a cylinder, Braque and Picasso too. Maybe they knew how to draw living people---not much evidence of either the ability or desire though. People could be constructed with, or deconstructed into, basic geometry. And wasn't the airbrush use so characteristic and delightful? Life and Art were 2 different places and not to be confused. Art Realism and Cinema Verité were as yet far off. Dealers, no doubt, as always, were busy making markets.
Style counted and it was an era of style stylisation and the Wow factor! Did it come off sometimes! Sure! Art on the edge! Pure escapism!
Illusion or delusion? Artists would be replaced by machines! That must have been the paymasters' vision, planning it even then.
But Art Deco wasn't all frivolity. These were serious artists, the best ones, and these were serious times, they were having serious fun; art lived with abandon, lived on the edge. Can you imagine that these were the depression years!
See it alive! See alive in pictures, on this DVD, the beautiful crazy doomed era of Art Deco! And this DVD is beautifully presented too and the images are ordered into books. You can just go to your nearest printers and ask that they print out any book you like and bind it for you so you don't have to look at everything on a computer screen; you can study and enjoy and "read" these pictures on your back.
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