The Decorative Twenties

New York: Walker and Company. 1969. — 224 p. This is the first comprehensive record of the decorative applied arts during the period between the Armistice after World War I and the Wall Street crash of 1929. Martin Battersby has provided a penetrating and often highly amusing account of the resurgence of creative design in most of the minor arts. Designers and artists worked again in the idiom of the opulent, decorative luxury of the late Edwardian period when the great designers of the Russian ballet were the arbiters of taste — a nostalgic trend that culminated in The Paris Exhibition of 1925, the first to be devoted entirely to contemporary decorative arts.