This is an example of the Lange & Heyne Georg with a rose gold case replete with several streamlined Art Deco details. Balancing this is the traditionality of the gleaming white enamel dial and the baroque splendour of the manually crafted gold hands. Equally striking is the manually wound calibre VIII that is visible through the exhibition caseback. It is beautifully constructed and finely adorned while also offering 55 hours of autonomy and conveniences such as hacking seconds.
Art Deco
Just look at the many names that have entered the canon of design history, and the diversity of their disciplines too, yet all moulded by the ethos of Art Deco: in fashion advertising the likes of Erte, and in advertising the likes of Cassandre; Ruhlmann and Lalique in glassware, Kem Weber in set design; in fine art Jean Dupas, Tamara de Lempika and Paul Manship; in architecture William Van Alen, Oskar Hansen and Ralph Walker; in product design Henry Dreyfuss, Russel Wright, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes, among others. Art Deco became a vernacular through which all could create.
Art Deco - first given full vent at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925, but coming into view in the years proceeding - offered a vision of the world that was progressive, confident, luxurious, expansive, familiar and yet simultaneously futuristic. What it didn’t do - as so many design movements before had done - was come with a demanding manifesto.
Rather, it maintained some continuity with the past: the florid exuberance of Art Nouveau or the ornamentation of Victoriana, for instance, even nods to Ancient Greece or Egypt. But with its directness of forms, its monolithic, stepped buildings, its geometry and streamlining, its readiness to use both the elaborate, high craft of bespoke, as well as new mass-manufactured materials the likes of tubular steel, chrome and new plastics, Art Deco managed to look simultaneously forward.
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