The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s

In the exhilarating decade of the 1920s, American patronage and creativity emerged on the world stage of design and decoration. The Jazz Age focuses on American tastes during the period, with the United States as consumer and originator, while considering Eastern and Western European influences to define an emerging language of modern design. 

The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is the first major museum exhibition to focus on American taste in art and design during the dynamic years of the 1920s and early 1930s. After the First World War, American money and culture helped transform the global marketplace. The United States became the leading marketplace for innovative architecture, interior decoration, decorative art, fashion, music, and film. 

With the map of Europe redrawn and social mores redefined, creative influences merged. Talent and craftsmanship, urbanity and experimentation flowed back and forth across the Atlantic with an influx of European émigré designers coming to America and a rush of American creative talent traveling and studying abroad. Against a backdrop of traditional historicist styles, a new language of design emerged to define an era of innovation and modernity—the Jazz Age—capturing the pulse and rhythm of the American spirit.

The exhibition examines the strong connections between France, primarily for luxury, and Austria with the United States, as talent and craftsmanship, urbanity and experimentation, including in the world of jazz and cinema, flowed back and forth across the Atlantic.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

 Whether you go or not, the lavishly illustrated exhibition catalog,  The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s, explores American taste and style during the golden age of the 1920s, capturing the dynamic pulse of the era’s jazz music. Following the destructive years of WWI, this flourishing decade marked a rebirth of aesthetic innovation that was cultivated to a great extent by American talent and patronage. Due to an influx of European émigrés to the United States, as well as American enthusiasm for traveling to Europe’s cultural capitals, a reciprocal wave of experimental attitudes began traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, forming a creative vocabulary that mirrored the ecstatic spirit of the times.  

The Jazz Age showcases developments in design, art, architecture, and technology during the ’20s and early ’30s, and places new emphasis on the United States as a vital part of the emerging marketplace for Art Deco luxury goods.  Featuring hundreds of full-color illustrations and essays by two leading historians of decorative arts, this comprehensive catalogue shows how America and the rest of the world worked to establish a new visual representation of modernity.

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