Read Art Deco vs Art Nouveau: A Comparative History

No two styles are confused more often, or with more confidence, than Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Both are rich, both are decorative, both rejected the borrowed historical dress of the nineteenth century, and both flowered within the working lifetime of a single architect — so the photographs blur together, and the labels in sale rooms and guidebooks blur with them. This book separates them properly. It follows Art Nouveau from its first flowering in Brussels and Paris in the 1890s — Horta's whiplash stair, Guimard's Métro gates, Gaudí's stone waves — and Art Deco from its naming day at the Paris Exposition of 1925 to the skyscrapers of New York and the cinemas of Mumbai. It compares the two grammars part by part: line against line, motif against motif, the workshop against the factory, stained glass against neon. It walks both styles around the world, watches each of them die, watches each of them return, and closes with the honest confusions — the Viennese facade of 1905 that looks more Deco than a Parisian one of 1925 — and with a field method of five signs by which any building can be read, and the two styles told apart, in the street.