Went this weekend to the Art Deco exhibit at the Fine Arts Museum. It was stunning.
I'd never seen footage of Josephine Baker dancing before, and so had never caught the crucial irony: there she was, the "savage" cabaret entertainer, with her bare breasts and her skirt of feathers...with an elegantly styled bob and delicate, well-made high-heeled shoes on her feet. You know, they say that if you really want to place someone socially, you need to check their haircut and their shoes...
More exciting, however, was this swoony 1920s poster from the Japanese designer Satomi Munetsugu. I am a sucker for Deco posters, as is much of the world, but I'd never heard of Satomi's work. This poster is a dramatic departure from the canonical Deco transportation iconography, which usually puts a static image of the means of transportation front and center. Here, the train almost disappears, subsumed into the blur of colors that is all you can see at high speed. The lettering disappears too - even the all-important name of the destination becomes a window through which we see the world fly by. It's as if Satomi just wants us to "focus" (ironic, here) on the act of seeing, rather than what is seen. What matters, he seems to be saying, is not the machinery of speed. Rather, it's the effect that new technologies have on human perception.
Leave a comment