The Unexpected Journeys of Art Deco
Few design movements have travelled as far, or arrived as unexpectedly, as Art Deco.
It is easy to think of it as a European story; Paris in the 1920s, the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925 that gave the movement its name, the ocean liners and hotel lobbies that carried its aesthetic westward to New York and Miami. That version of the story is not wrong. But it is incomplete.
Art Deco was, from its very beginning, a movement shaped by encounter. It absorbed Egyptian motifs in the wake of Tutankhamun's tomb. It drew on Japanese woodblock geometry, Persian tilework, the stepped forms of Mesoamerican temples. The discipline of the grid and the machine was always in conversation with older, slower traditions, with pattern languages that had been refined over centuries. This is, I think, what gave Art Deco its particular energy: it was a modern movement with a very long memory.
Nowhere is this more vivid than in the story of Cartier's Tutti Frutti jewels. In 1911, Jacques Cartier travelled to India for the Delhi Durbar, the great ceremonial gathering held in honour of King George V and encountered Mughal jewellery unlike anything he had seen in Europe. Carved emeralds in the shape of leaves. Rubies worked into berries and blossoms. Sapphires cut with a matte, almost velvety surface that caught light entirely differently from a faceted stone. He returned to Paris with trunks of carved gemstones, and over the following two decades, Cartier's craftsmen set them into platinum mounts of unmistakably Art Deco structure, geometric, precise, emphatically modern. The result was a collection that became one of Art Deco's most celebrated expressions: Indian lapidary tradition reframed within European design discipline, each piece holding both histories simultaneously. The style wasn't named Tutti Frutti until the 1970s. In Cartier's own workshops, they were simply called Hindou jewels.
The story of Art Deco in India runs deeper still. Bombay, known as Mumbai since 1995, the city I grew up in, holds the world's second largest concentration of Art Deco buildings, after Miami. Along Marine Drive and around the Oval Maidan, a seafront of rounded balconies, streamlined facades, and geometric ornament was built during the 1930s and 40s, not by colonial administrators, but largely by Indian architects and Indian patrons, for local residents. These buildings were a statement as much as a style: an embrace of modernity on Indian terms. In 2018, UNESCO recognised the Victorian and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai as a World Heritage Site, a designation that acknowledges not just the beauty of the buildings, but their cultural significance as a moment when a city claimed a global design language and made it entirely its own.
And then there is the New Palace in Morvi, Gujarat, perhaps the most unexpected Art Deco building I know of. Four hours west of Ahmedabad, in a small princely state in the former Saurashtra region, Maharaja Mahendrasinhji commissioned a palace in the early 1930s after falling in love with Art Deco during his travels to America as a young man. The result, designed by the British firm Gregson, Batley & King and built by Shapoorji Pallonji, is a two-storey palace of cylindrical columns, geometric motifs, walnut-panelled walls, and an indoor pool. It sits in a vast estate, occupying just one-tenth of its grounds, as if the modernity of the building needed space around it to breathe. It is a building that should not exist where it does. And yet it is completely coherent, a young maharaja's vision, fully realised.
What strikes me about all three of these moments, the Cartier Tutti Frutti jewels, the Marine Drive seafront, the New Palace in Morvi, is that Art Deco did not simply travel. It was adopted, absorbed, reinterpreted. Each place it reached left its own mark on the style, and the style left its mark on the place.
This quality, the way Art Deco holds geometry and ornament in balance, the way it makes something modern out of something ancient, is what drew me to it as a source for our own Bombay Deco collection. The designs in that series draw from two traditions simultaneously: the bold geometric forms of Bombay’s Art Deco, and the softer, scalloped arches of Rajput and Mughal architecture. They feel, to me, like a small continuation of what Art Deco has always done: finding a dialogue between eras, and letting that conversation become something new.
— Alpesh, Founder, Bombay Design Co. I'd love to hear from you, write to me at alpesh@bombaydesign.co