Deco vs Nouveau

[MissMittens]

I'm trying to get a mid 30's look and feel in one room, and am trying to find things that compliment. My question is, some styles during the period reflected the earlier Art Nouveau look, and others the more geometric Deco look....so, should I use Art Nouveau accent pieces (lighting, etc) and Deco paintings, etc? Or the other way around? Thanks.

 

[Flat Foot Floey]

I would go for art deco. I think art nouveau is an earlier style and would be pretty much outdated in the mid 30s. Even in the 20s some modernist styles like bauhaus already eliminated the floral pattern on furniture and architecture.

 

[DNO]

FFF is right, I believe. By the '30's Deco was all the rage. Nouveau would have been viewed as rather old-fashioned...it had pretty well fallen out of style by the early to mid-'20's. Both were decorative styles, not artistic schools.

 

[Flat Foot Floey]

FFF is right, I believe. By the '30's Deco was all the rage. Nouveau would have been viewed as rather old-fashioned...it had pretty well fallen out of style by the early to mid-'20's. Both were decorative styles, not artistic schools.

That's true. Avangarde art and popular styles were not the same. I only mentioned the bauhaus school because of the dominance of geometric forms. They would go for less decoration and ornamentation though.

 

[Miss Tuppence]

I’ve had a look in my good housekeeping magazine book from 1937, and there seems to be there's styles- The Modern/ art deco, the classic (quite grand/regency) and the homely (dare I say it the chintzy look!)! So I think it just depends on what you want!
If I had my interior design hat on, then I would choose quite modest furniture (I like the wooden stuff with carved details from the 30’s!) and tart the room up with the deco details- like lamps, artwork, soft furnishings and knickknacks!

 

[tonyb]

If you're looking for a "pure" high-style effect? If so, then concerning yourself with whether it's Nouveau or Deco might be in order. But if you're aiming for what might have actually been seen in a stylish, "modern" 1930s home, well, I dunno.

As an analogy, when I see how some folks shooting for that mid-century modern look (which has seen quite a popular resurgence of late), and I compare what they come up with to how fashion-forward homes were actually furnished back then (period magazines often provide good evidence), I can only conclude that what they get is an MCM theme with a strong early 21st century sensibility. And that's cool, you know. They're furnishing their homes, not curating museums.

FWIW, some of the most iconic and influential modernist designs date from the 1930s, and even earlier in a couple of notable cases -- Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair, for instance, dates from the late '20s. But I wouldn't use one of those if I were aiming for a "Deco" effect.

I'd wager that a typical home of that period would say neither "Nouveau" nor "Deco" to you. This is not to say that your ambitions for such a look are at all misguided, but only that such a stylish effect wouldn't be reflective of the way the large majority of homes were decorated during the 1930s. I mean, it was the Depression, after all.

 

[Dinerman]

Take a good long look through pictures on shorpy to see what actual people's rooms look like, too. Just like now, not everyone went out and furnished an entire house or room from the same maker at the same time buying the most cutting edge pieces.

An interesting picture: Sleek 1930s Modern international style architecture with more old fashioned furniture.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Dinerman makes a very good point -- there's a big difference between a movie set and a real 1930s home. Unless you were wealthy enough to hire a decorator to do the job from scratch, most actual homes of the time were furnished in a kind of chronological hodgepodge. Patterned/textured wallpaper from the teens and twenties was still very common, along with dark varnished woodwork, maybe an old Edwardian couch you'd gotten from your parents, a dining room set from the twenties you got cheap as a furniture-store closeout, and maybe a few more modernistic pieces you'd gotten yourself because you liked the look.

That's not to say you wouldn't find homes furnished in "pure" styles -- but if you look at the magazines that middle-class people of the time would have read and used to guide their styling decisions, pure modernism was something few would have dared to try. You'd most likely find such style in the home of someone who was youngish, college-educated, and well-off -- a group which made up a distinct minority in the thirties.

 

[tonyb]

The photo above well illustrates the point.

Then as now, most everybody's home was furnished in pieces from various periods and in various styles. Making those elements talk to each other, and the structure itself, is the trick.

 

[dhermann1]

For most of the 20th century Colonial Revival was all the rage in most conventional homes. You'll see variations throughout the decades of the century. Check out the Hardy home in the Andy Hardy movies.
The snazzy Deco styles were used mainly by the ultra hip. Check out the home of Nick and Nora Charles in the various Thin Man movies for a bench mark on that. Also, a lot of extreme Deco was used in offices, rather than homes.
Another term you should Google is Streamline Modern or Moderne. Moderne, the extreme geometric blank wall style, originated as early as the early 1920's.
You really have to see complete interiors to get a real idea.
In general, most homes were a lot more frumpy and random that we remember.

 

[tonyb]

Just thinkin' out loud here, but I gotta wonder if we moderns pay more attention to such matters than people typically did 60 and 70 and 80 years ago. Sometimes it seems that way. But then, I don't suppose that I and the company I keep are necessarily typical of the overall population.

To echo dhermann1's observation, I recall from my childhood years that a style called "Early American" (I assume that's essentially the same as "Colonial Revival") was what most of our moms found "tasteful." When a relatively well-to-do aunt and uncle furnished their new home in sleeker, sparer "modern" pieces, the gossip among the proletariat was that it was too sterile, although that wasn't quite the language they used.

 

[Haversack]

One thing to bear in mind is that most houses built in the 1920s and 30s were neither done in the style of Art Nouveau nor Art Deco. Instead, most were built in some form of Revival style, (Cape Cod, Colonial, Tudor, Spanish Colonial, usw.), or they were a vernacular form of Craftsman. Similarly, furniture in the various Revival-styles was also made. Colonial Revival furniture being the most popular.

One way to gauge average peoples' decor is to look at the furniture pages in the Sears' catalogs from 1930 to 1939. It isn't until the 1936 catalog that you see what we would call Art Deco furniture offered outside of bedroom settings. (Bedroom furniture was usually the first new furniture that a young married couple would buy.)

 

[Deco-Doll-1928]

I found this website that might be helpful!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanvintagehome/sets/72157606580042229/

 

[tonyb]

I found this website that might be helpful!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanvintagehome/sets/72157606580042229/

Wow.

 

[Mr Vim]

I second that wow with my own...
WOW!

It's the holy grail of clippings, are these in our sticky section thingys?

 

[Atomic Age]

Just thinkin' out loud here, but I gotta wonder if we moderns pay more attention to such matters than people typically did 60 and 70 and 80 years ago. Sometimes it seems that way. But then, I don't suppose that I and the company I keep are necessarily typical of the overall population.

To echo dhermann1's observation, I recall from my childhood years that a style called "Early American" (I assume that's essentially the same as "Colonial Revival") was what most of our moms found "tasteful." When a relatively well-to-do aunt and uncle furnished their new home in sleeker, sparer "modern" pieces, the gossip among the proletariat was that it was too sterile, although that wasn't quite the language they used.

My parents did their home in Colonial Revival in the mid 50's. In the last few years I lamented to my mom that if they had decorated in the Mid Century Modern style, she would have a small fortune on her hands today. Her reply was that stuff was considered "cheap" at the time!

Doug

 

[Atomic Age]

I found this website that might be helpful!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanvintagehome/sets/72157606580042229/

Very cool. If I'm not mistaken, a good deal of those images come directly from the Sears Catalog.

Doug

 

[dhermann1]

Go one step up and you'll find this set of images. REALLY useful and fascinating.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanvintagehome/

 

[LizzieMaine]

Those Congoleum and Armstrong Quaker rugs shown in the above link are a real hallmark of a thirties home -- they were a sort of linoleum-like product that reproduced the pattern of a fine woven rug in printed form, sort of like spreading out a big photo of a rug on your floor. They required a lot less maintenance than a fiber rug, and for a while were extremely popular.

I have an original Armstrong Quaker Rug in my kitchen, under the table. They're out there, but they aren't easy to find. Most of them got used to death and thrown away long ago.

 

[dhermann1]

I had one of those linoleum "rugs" in the summer cottage I sold a few years ago. The new owners put a lot of much needed renovation into the place, but they were hip enough to preserve that, tho it's now got a regular rug covering it. It was tacked to he floor when it was laid down in the 30's, so any attempt to pull it up would just totally destroy it. It's in a pattern exactly resembling an oriental rug.