Exquisite and vulgar

It was a large shop, almost an emporium, wide, deep, on two floors, with two open staircases and, on the shadowed side of the sunlit street, in semi-darkness.

The dusty windows were crammed with figures of naked women, their hair in Marcel waves, crouching in hoops as though they were practising a new form of locomotion, striving with bows and arrows, restraining pairs of hounds and leaping horses, and, in mildly decorous Sapphic mood, not restraining each other.

Venturing in, I found curvaceous furniture amply bellying, soft-shouldered ziggurats of it, all in pale veneers peeling to reveal the shoddy carcass pine beneath and grubby rugs in shades of brown - not the browns of Berber rugs, not the browns of Congo fabrics, their patterns ancient and ancestral, but the browns of an Odeon cinema in Bromley in 1935 or so, the browns then called nigger and ginger, cinnamon and clove, relieved in tangerine and beige, woven in the patterns of the age of jazz.

I was in Algiers, idling, waiting uneasily for a plane as Algeria shut down to devote itself again to the internecine strife that still continues there, and had chanced upon this sad monument to the French occupation that had ended 30 years before.

I conjure this melancholy picture because, try as I might - and did - I could find nothing in that shop worth buying; the prices were far below those asked in the Portobello Road, but the goods were cheap too in the word's other sense, so tawdry as to be distasteful, far beyond the joke that justifies good or clever kitsch - it was the nadir of Art Deco and the nadir of French taste.

And that's the problem with Art Deco - it died as suddenly as it was born because it could not resist an overwhelming virus of vulgarity. It was an urban vernacular culture, shallow, that required no depth of aesthetic experience to enjoy, that was in direct contact with all other aspects of urban culture, with advertising, cinema, musical comedy, the early plays of Terence Rattigan, hotels, restaurants, office blocks, transport and, perhaps above all, with objects of mass manufacture large and small, the refrigerator, the toaster and the Hoover.

Art Deco is framed by the two world wars, beginning perhaps a little earlier than the first, and overlapping with the more severe forms of Art Nouveau, tailing to an end in Europe concurrently with the Munich crisis and Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. In America it went out with a flourish the following year, with the New York World Fair of 1939.

It is exactly what its name implies - decorative art, a thing of embellishment and frills. But it is also more than that for it affected painting, sculpture, the print, and architecture, the greatest art of all, the most sublime, was particularly its servant and often its victim.

Art Deco affected everything that was designed and made by hand or mass manufacture, in every material from cheap chrome and Bakelite, to precious minerals, metals and rare woods, from the cotton dress in C&A to the most extravagant creations of Worth and Schiaparelli, from the cheap-jack ceramics of Clarice Cliff to the finest Norwegian porcelain.

If it had a theoretical drive, it was only to put an end to the not so old distinctions between art and industry, between the artist and the craftsman. The pressing question with Art Deco is 'Can a teapot be a work of art?' - and with it all the now old and weary arguments about form and function as opposed to uselessness come into play.