48 Fun Facts About Art Deco

During the 1925 Paris exposition, which landmark did carmaker Citroën turn into a giant illuminated advertisement for itself?

Eiffel Tower. André Citroën spelled out his name down three of its sides in coloured bulbs for the fair that later gave Art Deco its name, and the sign stayed lit into the 1930s.

Which American-born dancer became a Paris sensation in 1925 and a favourite subject of Art Deco posters and figurines?

Josephine Baker. She had sailed from New York at 19, and her stage costume of little more than a skirt of artificial bananas became a lasting emblem of the Jazz Age.

Which suspension bridge, opened in 1937, has Art Deco towers and streetlamps styled by architect Irving Morrow?

Golden Gate Bridge. Morrow also chose its orange-red paint, because the colour suits the surrounding hills and stays visible to ships in San Francisco's fog.

Art Deco's bold geometry has its origins in Cubism and which movement co-founded by painter Gustav Klimt?

The Vienna Secession. Klimt and his allies walked out of Vienna's conservative artists' association in 1897, hence the name, and their taste for straight lines and squares fed directly into Art Deco.

Which dance company's colourful sets by Leon Bakst helped inspire Art Deco's palette?

The Ballets Russes. Sergei Diaghilev's troupe caused a sensation in Paris from 1909, and Bakst's opulent sets and costumes started a craze that spread to fashion and interior design.

The discovery of which pharaoh's tomb fed the ancient-Egyptian motifs of 1920s Art Deco?

Tutankhamun. After the tomb was opened in 1922, lotus flowers, scarabs and pyramids began appearing on everything from evening jackets to cinema fronts.

Which 1913 venue by Auguste Perret is regarded as the first Art Deco landmark in Paris?

The Theatre des Champs-Elysees. Less than two months after opening it staged the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a night remembered for the uproar in the audience.

Which country did France leave off the guest list for the 1925 Paris exposition because of the First World War?

Germany. It was shut out over lingering wartime bitterness, even though Austria, its ally in that war, was invited and took part.

Which architect's stark white pavilion at the 1925 Paris exposition, stripped of all ornament, foreshadowed modernism?

Le Corbusier. Inside the bare white box he displayed his Plan Voisin, a proposal to demolish a swathe of central Paris and rebuild it as rows of identical towers.

Which furniture designer starred at the 1925 Paris exposition with a pavilion styled as a wealthy collector's house?

Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. He refused mass production and veneered his pieces in the rarest woods, which made them so costly that modernist critics attacked them as furniture only the rich could own.

Which city's historic district is billed as the world's largest concentration of Art Deco architecture?

Miami Beach. Barbara Capitman's campaigners won the district a place on the National Register in 1979, yet its Senator Hotel was still razed for a car park in 1988 despite their candlelight vigils.

Which fashion designer was shot dead in 1997 outside his mansion on Ocean Drive, in the heart of an Art Deco district?

Gianni Versace. He was shot on his own front steps as he came home from a morning walk, the victim of serial killer Andrew Cunanan.

Which New Zealand city was rebuilt in Art Deco style after a 1931 earthquake levelled it?

Napier. New Zealand's deadliest earthquake killed at least 256 people, and fires gutted the centre when the water supply failed, so the town was rebuilt all at once in the style of the day.

Which Indian city's Victorian and Art Deco ensemble was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018?

Mumbai. Its Art Deco flats and cinemas went up on land reclaimed from the bay, directly facing the Victorian Gothic public buildings across the open ground of the Oval Maidan.

Who designed the Chrysler Building?

William Van Alen. Walter Chrysler refused to pay his fee, so he sued and won, but the lawsuit wrecked his reputation with clients and he ended his career teaching sculpture.

The winged steel sculptures on the Chrysler Building's 31st-floor corners are giant replicas of which part of a 1929 Chrysler car?

Radiator caps. Walter Chrysler wanted the tower to advertise his cars, so the same floor also carries a brick frieze of hubcaps and mudguards.

The Chrysler Building's gleaming crown is clad in which metal, made to a formula patented by Krupp of Essen?

Stainless steel. Krupp's engineers had patented the rust-resisting alloy only in 1912, and the tower used it for crown, window frames and decoration alike, making it an early American showcase for the metal.

The Chrysler Building's brief reign as the world's tallest building was ended in 1931 by which New York skyscraper?

Empire State Building. Its mast was planned as a mooring station for airships, with passengers boarding from the 102nd floor, but the winds up there made docking impossible.

Which New York theatre, opened in 1932, has Art Deco interiors by competition winner Donald Deskey?

Radio City Music Hall. Deskey later moved from showpiece interiors to supermarket shelves, designing the Crest toothpaste pack.

Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed for including a portrait of whom?

Lenin. Nelson Rockefeller asked Rivera to paint the face out; he refused, the unfinished fresco was destroyed, and Rivera repainted the whole scene in Mexico from photographs.

Which mythological figure is Paul Manship's gilded statue overlooking the Rockefeller Center ice rink?

Prometheus. Manship shows the Titan tumbling through a ring of zodiac signs with the fire he stole for mankind; the centre's other famous statue, Atlas, is by Lee Lawrie.

Which statue, completed in 1931 and sculpted by France's Paul Landowski, ranks as the world's largest Art Deco sculpture?

Christ the Redeemer. The open arms are credited to Brazilian artist Carlos Oswald: the design that won the commission had shown Christ holding a cross in one hand and a globe in the other.

Which later strand of Art Deco swept American design in the 1930s?

Streamline Moderne. It borrowed the wind-cheating curves of fast machines and wrapped them around things that never moved, from petrol pumps and fridges to cigarette lighters.

Which 1934 American car, shaped by wind-tunnel tests, pioneered the aerodynamic look yet flopped with buyers?

Chrysler Airflow. Buyers balked at its rounded, unfamiliar looks, and the car meant to change motoring was a commercial failure that came close to disaster for its maker.

Which Cunard liner of 1936, decorated in Art Deco style, is now a floating hotel moored at Long Beach, California?

Queen Mary. As a wartime troopship she once carried more than 16,000 people on a single crossing, and in 1967, too big for the Panama Canal, she rounded Cape Horn to reach her retirement berth.

Cassandre's celebrated 1935 poster depicted which French liner head-on?

Normandie. Seven years after the poster, the ship itself burned and capsized at a New York pier while being refitted as a troopship.

Which early plastic, invented in 1907, was moulded into countless Art Deco radios, telephones and costume jewellery?

Bakelite. Leo Baekeland's resin was the first plastic made wholly from synthetic ingredients, and because it set hard, resisted heat and did not conduct electricity, it became the casing of the radio age.

Tamara de Lempicka's famous 1929 self-portrait shows her at the wheel of which car?

A Bugatti. The German fashion magazine Die Dame commissioned the self-portrait for a cover celebrating independent women, though Lempicka is said to have owned only a small yellow Renault.

The Russian-born designer Erte took his pseudonym from what?

The French pronunciation of his initials: R and T, for Romain de Tirtoff. He took the pen name to spare his family, because his admiral father had wanted him to become a naval officer.

Rene Lalique, the glassmaker famed for vases and perfume bottles, also famously made what for cars?

Hood ornaments. Lalique was already a celebrated jeweller when he turned to glass, and by the late 1920s his moulded mascots, such as the wind-blown head Spirit of the Wind, were riding on smart cars.

Which designer's bright colours and exotic catalogues influenced Art Deco fashion before WWI?

Paul Poiret. He dressed Paris in harem pants and turbans in brilliant purples, reds and oranges, and said of his hobble skirt: 'I freed the bust, and I shackled the legs.'

Which London power station, fitted out inside in Art Deco style, appears with a flying pig on Pink Floyd's Animals?

Battersea Power Station. During the 1976 cover shoot the 40-foot inflatable pig broke free of its moorings and drifted over Heathrow, where flights had to be cancelled.

Eltham Palace pairs a medieval great hall with a 1930s Art Deco house built for which textile dynasty?

The Courtaulds. Stephen and Virginia gave their pet lemur, Mah-Jongg, the run of the house and a room of his own upstairs, with a hatch leading down to the flower room.

Which Ohio city's Art Deco Union Terminal, crowned by a giant half-dome, inspired the Hall of Justice in DC Comics?

Cincinnati. Hanna-Barbera, the studio behind the 1970s Super Friends cartoons, was then owned by a Cincinnati broadcaster, and its artist based the heroes' headquarters on the 1933 station.

Which Paris palace, built for the 1937 world's fair in late Art Deco style, replaced the old Trocadéro Palace on its hilltop?

Palais de Chaillot. Eleven years after it opened, the United Nations General Assembly met in the building and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights there.

What replaced Art Deco as the dominant architectural approach after the Second World War?

The International Style. After the war ornament came to be seen as unnecessary, so plain buildings of glass, steel and concrete took the place of Art Deco's flamboyance.

Norman Bel Geddes, whose designs ran from cocktail shakers to airliners, created which hit exhibit of the 1939 New York World's Fair?

Futurama. General Motors' ride carried visitors over a model of America twenty years on, laced with automated motorways, and six decades later its name was borrowed for Matt Groening's cartoon.

Art Deco jewellers increasingly set their diamonds in which strong white metal instead of gold?

Platinum. It is strong enough for a sliver of metal to grip a whole cluster of stones, which made possible the icy all-white look of diamonds and rock crystal at the end of the 1920s.

In France, the 1920s look that English speakers called the flapper style took which name, from a scandalous 1922 novel?

La Garçonne. Victor Margueritte's novel about a young woman who set out to live as freely as a man so shocked France that he was stripped of his Legion of Honour.

Which British sculptor, also the designer of a famous sans-serif typeface, carved the Art Deco statues on BBC Broadcasting House?

Eric Gill. Over the entrance he set Prospero and Ariel from The Tempest: a magician and a spirit of the air suited a building that sent voices through it.

In architecture, Art Deco succeeded and reacted against which earlier style?

Art Nouveau. Where it had copied the curves of flower stalks, vine tendrils and insect wings, Art Deco answered with straight lines, zigzags and the look of the machine.

Which New Deal agency's Federal Art Project hired jobless artists to decorate public buildings?

Works Progress Administration. Its art project was unemployment relief first and art second: it paid more than 5,000 artists at its 1936 peak and about 10,000 over its eight years.

Chicago's Neo Art Deco NBC Tower was inspired by which New York landmark?

30 Rockefeller Plaza. It is NBC's headquarters, so the 1989 Chicago tower that houses the network's studios was designed to look strikingly like the New York original.

Which 2007 video game is set in Rapture, a ruined underwater city built in lavish Art Deco style?

BioShock. The tycoon Andrew Ryan founds the city in 1946 as a refuge from governments, and the designers used its Art Deco halls and period adverts to show how the dream fell apart.

Josef Hoffmann's Stoclet Palace, a lavish prototype of Art Deco built for a Belgian financier, stands in which city?

Brussels. Hoffmann was given an unlimited budget and designed everything down to the door handles; the Stoclet family still owns the house and keeps it closed to visitors.

Which Colorado River dam, finished in 1936, was styled with Art Deco towers and guarded by two winged bronze figures?

Hoover Dam. Roosevelt's administration insisted on calling it Boulder Dam, and only in 1947 did Congress restore the name of the president under whom it was begun.

The Art Deco glassmaking firm Daum was based in which French city?

Nancy. Daum made its name there with the flowing, flower-strewn glass of the 1890s, then changed course after the First World War and turned out vases that were solid, geometric and chunky.

Demétre Chiparus's prized Art Deco figurines of dancers combined bronze with which other material?

Ivory. The pairing is called chryselephantine, a word coined for the gold-and-ivory statues of ancient Greek temples and borrowed for these far smaller figures.