Art Deco was a broad international style in design, architecture, and the decorative arts that flourished from the mid-1910s through the 1930s. Its defining characteristics include geometric abstraction, bold contrasts of colour and material, stylised ornament, and a rejection of the organic curves of the preceding Art Nouveau movement in favour of angular, architectural forms. In jewellery, Art Deco translated into sharp lines, strong black-and-white contrasts (typically onyx and diamond), and compositions that owed as much to modern architecture and machine aesthetics as to natural forms.
Cartier's adoption of Art Deco was a natural development from its existing design sensibility under Louis Cartier's leadership. The firm had already moved away from the flowing naturalism of the late nineteenth century toward the crisper, more geometric garland style in the Belle Époque. The Art Deco turn accelerated this geometric tendency and introduced new sources of inspiration: Cubism, Constructivism, Egyptian archaeology (the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 had an immediate and dramatic effect on jewellery design), and Japanese and East Asian art.
Cartier Art Deco: A Beautiful Adornment explores the style with specific pieces, while Louis Cartier and the Cartier Style provides biographical context for the design philosophy that guided the firm's output.
At Cartier, Art Deco produced some of the most visually striking jewellery of the century: diamond and onyx bracelets with an almost architectural severity, Egyptian-inspired pieces in coloured hardstones, geometric wristwatch designs including early versions of the Tank, and clock designs by Maurice Couët that drew on Egyptian, Chinese, and Cubist sources simultaneously. The style also intersected with the Tutti Frutti work, where the geometry of the platinum mounts provided a structured framework for the exuberant carved gemstones.
The style was enormously influential and widely imitated beyond the firms that originated it.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 5 (“Stones Paris: Early 1920s”) and ch. 6 (“Moicartier New York: Mid-1920s”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 71, 135 et al.
- Wikipedia: Art Deco at Cartier
