Art & Statues
Art Deco Graphics
Art Deco Graphics
Written by Patricia Frantz Kery and published by Harry N. Abrams in 1986, Art Deco Graphics remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of graphic design during the three decades before World War II. Across 320 pages with 483 illustrations, 244 of them in full color, the book covers posters, magazine covers, book design, packaging, and fashion illustration, gathering work from Europe, the Americas, and Japan. Kery, a New York gallery owner specializing in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century graphics, brings a collector's eye to work by major names like Cassandre, Jean Carlu, and E. McKnight Kauffer alongside many pieces reproduced here for the first time.
Kery approaches Art Deco graphic design as the product of a genuine cultural collision, tracing how the style absorbed ideas from Cubism, Constructivism, and Futurism alongside the applied arts innovations of groups like the Vienna Secession and the Bauhaus. She also credits the era's leading fashion designers, including Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel, with shaping the visual vocabulary that graphic artists would later put to commercial use. The book organizes this material into focused chapters on posters, magazines, commercial design, book illustration, and fashion, each opening with an illustrated introduction before moving into a full portfolio of images.
What sets this book apart from many broader Art Deco surveys is its focus specifically on printed and reproduced graphic work rather than furniture or decorative objects. Travel posters, advertising campaigns, magazine covers, packaging design, and book illustration all receive dedicated attention, with images drawn from collections and archives well beyond the usual French and American sources, including material from Latin America and Japan. Individual artist biographies accompany the plates, giving the book lasting reference value beyond its role as a visual survey.
Kery, also the author of Great Magazine Covers of the World, brought her expertise as a working gallerist to this project, and the book has remained a standard reference for designers, collectors, and scholars since its 1986 publication. For anyone building a library focused specifically on the graphic and commercial side of Art Deco, rather than its furniture or architecture, this book covers ground that few other single volumes attempt with comparable depth.
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