About Fabio:
Fabio Grementieri, architect and preservationist based in Buenos Aires, is member of the National Commission of Monuments of Argentina and Head of the Preservation Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He has worked on different restoration and preservation projects of buildings of the 19th and 20th centuries and as advisor to several public and private institutions both in his country and abroad. He has lectured extensively on his expertise and is the author of several books on the heritage of Argentina. In 2009 he received the Henry Hope Reed Award of the University of Notre Dame.
The Rioplatense Modern as a Melting Pot
Following a brief review of the revivalist Beaux-Arts decorative style of bygone eras which dominated the four annual Paris Salons throughout the 19th century, and an illustrated discussion of the high-style Art Nouveau movement which replaced it at the fin-de-siecle and then ran its full course by 1910, the presentation provides a chronological history of how and where the fledgling Art Deco grammar of decorative ornament emerged in household applied arts prior to WWI, with profiles of its pioneer designers; most notably, Paul Iribe (magazine illustrator), Antoine Bourdelle (sculptor), and Eileen Gray (furniture designer). This is followed by a review of the style’s first patrons who were almost exclusively in the French fashion industry, including celebrated couturiers, dress-makers, embroiderers, and milliners such as Jacques Doucet, Jeanne Lanvin, Madeleine Vionnet and Suzanne Talbot. The next chronological step in the growth of the Deco style, which blossomed at the early 1920s Salons, was buoyed by the emerging economic optimism of the post-war Machine Age, its stylistic dominance sealed at the 1925 Paris Exposition in the displays of the epoch’s foremost modernist designers. An illustrated discussion of the highly colorful and playful geometric creations which ruled the Salons in the immediate post-war, dominated by a pastiche of zig-zag, geometric floral and streamlined motifs, is revealed in their works. This is followed by a review of the collections of those foreigners of avant-garde design, categorized at the time as ‘contemporary’ art, that were formed in India, Spain, and the United States. After WWII the Art Deco style lost its popularity amongst consumers and connoisseurs until re-discovered and revived in the late 1960s with the first expositions and publications on the movement. By 1970 the term ‘Art Deco’ had been coined to describe the distinct interwar decorative aesthetic defined now nostalgically both as that of the Jazz Age and Machine Age, which ranged from the unrivalled cabinetry of the French ebenistes of the mid-1920s to the American Bakelite bric-a-brac of a decade later. With its newly revived exposure, works from the period began to appear in the marketplace from their original homes, primarily in France, as collector interest drew fierce competition. Prices for signature works by the likes of Ruhlmann, Dunand, Rateau and Gray rose exponentially, soon into the 7-figures, with no ceiling seemingly in sight. The style’s second generation of collectors emerged at this time, again dominated by icons of the fashion industry, including Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. In the 1980s, further major collections of Art Deco began to form, three which reached the marketplace at auction in Paris in 2006, 2009, and 2011. Of these, the Claude Dray sale, staged by Christies at the Grand Palais in Paris, generated $63.5 million with 12 works each exceeding the E1 million mark. Three years later, in the Yves St. Laurent estate auction, a ‘Dragon” armchair by Gray was hammered down at an astonishing E20 million. These were followed shortly thereafter by the estate sale of a major New York collection and the creation in Portugal of the first museum collection devoted entirely to the Deco style.
