About Alastair:

Alastair Duncan, an officer and then consultant of Christie’s, New York, for 10 years (1977-1986), is an independent consultant for 19th and 20th Century Decorative Arts. While full-time at Christie’s, he organized and catalogued scores of sales devoted to Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Victorian works. Then and since, Mr. Duncan has traveled throughout the United States, the Far East, Europe and South America to appraise, assemble and sell collections from the period Mr. Duncan is the author of 37 books on the decorative arts, focusing primarily on the French Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods (1900-1930), and the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany and his Tiffany Studios. He has also written articles for numerous magazines, including Connaissance des Arts, Vogue, Connoisseur, The magazine Antiques, and House and Garden. In addition, he has researched and authored exhibition catalogues for art galleries in New York and the Museu Serralves in Oporto, Portugal, including Rene Buthaud (1981), Jean Dunand (1985), AA Rateau (1990), and The Berardo Art Deco Collection (2006), plus several similar department store exhibitions in Japan One of his books, American Art Deco (1986), served as the catalogue for an exhibition on the subject which opened at the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., in April 1987 before travelling to museums in Miami, Omaha, Tulsa, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Another publication of his, Masterworks of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1989), likewise acted as the catalogue for the exhibition of Tiffany masterpieces staged at the Smithsonian Institution from September 28, 1989, to March 4, 1990, and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from April 11 to September 9, 1990. An expanded version of the Tiffany Masterworks exhibition, for which Mr. Duncan likewise served as the guest curator, opened in Japan at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum in January, 1991, before traveling to museum in Kobe, Nagoya, and Toyama Mr. Duncan received an M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. After working in London, he emigrated to the United States, where he joined Christie’s when it opened its American auction rooms in New York in 1977.

The Eclectic Development of Art Deco

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.