ART NOUVEAU and ART DECO LIGHTING

The high point of Art Nouveau, around 1900, happened to coincide with the commercial beginnings of electricity. This was the basis of a revolution in lamp design, which released a torrent of original work by talented people in all the Western countries. Lewis Comfort Tiffany is perhaps the name that first comes to mind, and certainly the Tiffany Studios were extraordinarily prolific and popular in their day. But in Europe too, and particularly in France, sculptors, architects, engineers, designers of all kinds produced a multiplicity of lighting fixtures – table-lamps, chandeliers, candelabra – most of them using a curious mixture of motifs of flower, insect, and bird subjects, and, above all, Woman.After the First World War, however, there was a complete revolution in taste and Art Nouveau, the essence of decorativeness, was supplanted by what came to be known as Art Déco, dedicated to functionalism without frills. This was an angular or tubular, unadorned style which prevailed up to the Second World War and permeates the backgrounds of films made in that period.