The exhibition Modern Taste. Art Deco in Paris, 1910-1935 will be on display in Madrid at the Fundación Juan March between 26 March and 28 June. It aims to offer visitors the chance to learn about, enjoy and appreciate what has been termed “the last total style” in history: the hard-to-define Art Deco. This is the first exhibition on the subject to be held in Spain and the first outside a multi-collection or decorative arts museum, given that the Juan March is an institution with an exhibition programme focused essentially on modern art.
The style now known as Art Deco was an alternative to the avant-garde, implying a modernism that was more pragmatic and ornamental than utopian and functionalist. Eventually it became the great style of the modern taste and aspirations that were so characteristic of western societies and capitalism in the early decades of the 20th century.
Organization.-
Modern Taste. Art Deco in Paris, 1910-1935 is structured into eight chronological and thematic sections which together narrate a phenomenon that is as fascinating at it is unknown. Including more than 350 examples of painting, sculpture, furniture, fashion, jewellery, perfumery, film, architecture, stained-glass, ceramics, lacquer and goldsmith’s work in addition to textiles, book-bindings, photographs, drawings, plans, architectural models, advertising posters and magazines, the exhibition combines reconstructions and recreations that reveal the modern taste and the atmosphere of a period that is both extremely difficult to capture but also notably present in contemporary culture.
Modern Taste. Art Deco in Paris, 1910-1935 also focuses on the presence of the exotic in Art Deco, particularly in relation to the Colonial Exhibition held in Paris in 1931. It continues up to the 1930s when the style’s distinctive modernity combined and fused with the new forms evolved by Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and Eileen Grey that are habitually identified with Modernism, a movement from which Art Deco has been curiously and unjustly excluded.
Venue.- Fundación Juan March. Castelló St., 77. Madrid, Spain.
Date.- 26th of March 2015 - 28th of June de 2015.
