I wish i'd been a little less surly when I agreed to attend the opening of the new Art Deco show at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. “Don't like Art Deco; told you that a million times,” I grumbled. “Try it,” urged my editor, Suzanne Moutis. Then my daughter Amy intervened. She'd seen the exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London a few months ago: “It's fantastic. Don't be an idiot. Go.”
So I went and was embarrassed into admitting it was, indeed, a delicious treat. When I think I don't like Art Deco, I realize I am speaking more about some of the furniture – all those sharp edges, all that shiny finish, that brittleness I associate with French culture during that period. But when I saw the 250-piece collection of decorative arts as a whole, a collection taken from several countries, I realized it's been there, harmoniously, in my life all along. I just had never put it all together.
What you'll see in this collection, Art Deco 1910-1939, is a style that runs through fashion, interior design, industrial design and art – in other words, everything from dishes and jewellery to automobiles and dresses, from paintings and posters to chairs and rugs and tables. It even affected film and music; it was, of course, the jazz age. As I gazed around me, I felt as if my mother – who died in 1997 – were standing beside me. This was her era, and in many ways her best time. I still have her sketches from her years in Italy and in Montreal where she studied art and interior design and here, in these rooms, were the real things she was drawing in the 1930s. Here, at the ROM, for example, was the same kind of McLaughlin Buick coupe she learned to drive in (and I still have the reversible motor robe from it), the same kind of dresses she and her sisters wore (and I still have many of these), even the same Susie Cooper china and the same kind of silver tea service and cutlery she bought many years later, in the late 1950s. Even the music playing in the background was the music we heard as kids, including a Josephine Baker favourite. (The snippet of film on Baker dancing topless is wonderful.)
The exhibit made me appreciate just how sophisticated and accepting my mother was, far more so than I, mired as I am in the 18th and 19th centuries. As she grew older, she couldn't wait to give my brothers and me her stuff. “I want new and fresh things,” she would insist. And it took me until now to see that she was talking about Art Deco, a style that threw off the fustiness of the Victorian/Edwardian household in which she'd grown up. She wouldn't have known that name, though; according to the curators, Art Deco wasn't even coined as a name until 1966.
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