Art Deco is the popular name for a style of artistic expression that flourished from the 1920s to the early 1940s. During its time it was called the modern style, the new style or streamline style... it was the contemporary style of the period.

What we now know as Art Deco resulted from an exposition held in Paris in 1925, L'Exposition Intemationale des Arts Decoratifs et lndustriels Modernes, from which the names of the major styles of the period - Art Deco and Moderne - are derived.

Art Deco was a unifying concept encompassing art, architecture, graphics, and industrial design. Origins of Art Deco were primarily European with ethnic influences including Mayan, Polynesian, African, and Egyptian (with the 1923 discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen).

American industrial designers adapted Art Deco style and combined it with new materials - aluminum, bakelite, fiberglass, marcasite, and neon -to create a unique streamlined 20th Century look.

Art Deco is a fusion of all these disparate influences. Ornamentation includes stepped elements, rays, chevrons, zigzags, and heroic human forms. Design characteristics suggest speed, power, and stylized beauty. Art Deco expresses a fundamental belief in progress, human improvement futurism, and the beneficial relationship of man and machine.

Art Deco style penetrated contemporary life so deeply that it influenced people's clothing and their behavior, their means of travel and work, and the way they spent their free time, spearheaded by American movies and entertainment magazines. Art Deco molded leisure and the modern culture.

By the late 1930's when most of Newport's Deco was built, Art Deco was in its streamlined phase. After World War II, the International Style, devoid of all decoration, held sway. Not until the late 1960s did people begin to rediscover deco and take it seriously as a design aesthetic.

The cultural and artistic achievements of the Art Deco era are richly distinctive and creatively unsurpassed. Art Deco is a marvelously modern, lyrically lovely, and a not-so-remote part of modern American history well worth preserving.

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Where Art Nouveau had been heavy, complex and crowded, Art Deco was clean and pure. Art Deco was thoroughly modern in turning away from the winding, sinuous qualities of Art Nouveau, looking instead to the ideas of abstract design. When it did turn toward nature for inspiration, it preferred to portray animals, or the beauties of the female form.

The lines in Art Deco did not swirl around like the center of a whirlpool. If they curved, they were gradual and sweeping, following a fine arc. If they were straight, they were straight as a ruler. Art Deco could be light-hearted on one level and deadly serious practical on another. As the style in a time of unprecedented change, it was fluid enough to reflect that change.

Art Deco motifs and themes include:

• Geometric shapes - representing the machine and technology which it was thought would solve all our problems.

• Sunbursts and fountains - representing the dawn of a new modern age.

• Symbols of speed, power and flight - the exiting new developments in transport and communications.

• The Skyscraper shape - symbolic of the 20th century.

• The new woman - revelling in her recently won social freedoms.

• Breaking the rules - cacophonous jazz, short skirts and hair, shocking dances.

• Ancient and regional cultures - there was a fascination with the civilizations of Egypt, central America, indigenous cultures and regionally inspired design.