Art Deco was the last truly sumptuous style, a legitimate and highly fertile chapter in the history of the applied arts. There is a continuing debate, however, on the exact definition of the term 'Art Deco' and the extent of the movement it encompassed. The initial belief, fostered when the Art Deco revival began, roughly in the mid-196os, was that Art Deco was the antithesis of Art Nouveau, and had been spawned in 1920 to eradicate its 1900 predecessor, which history had already judged a grave, but mercifully brief, transgression against good taste. Today this theory is considered incorrect: Art Deco is seen not as the direct opposite of Art Nouveau but, in many aspects, as an extension of it, particularly in its preoccupation with lavish ornamentation, superlative craftsmanship and fine materials. Nor, as has been commonly believed, did Art Deco take root abruptly in 1920 and flower until it was blighted by the economic depression which engulfed Europe and the United States in 1930.
The First World War has generally been taken as the dividing line between the Art Nouveau and Art Deco eras, but the Art Deco style was actually conceived in the years 1908-12, a period usually considered as transitional. Like its predecessors, it was an evolving style that did not start or stop at any precise moment. Many items now accepted as pure Art Deco - furniture and objets d'art by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Paul Iribe, Clément Mère and Paul Follot, for example - were designed either before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, or during the war. The movement cannot therefore be rigidly defined, as it has been, within the decade 1920-30. Its inception was earlier, as was its decline. In fact, were it not for the four-year hiatus created by the First World War, the Art Deco style would have run its full, and natural, course by 1920.
What are the characteristics of Art Deco? In many ways, the style defies precise definition as it drew on a host of diverse, and often conflicting, influences. These were primarily from the world of avant-garde painting in the early years of the century.