First take on the Art Deco Exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne, opened to members only today.

The Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibitions have been hugely successful for the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

Art Deco will be no exception. My special preview today, indicated the ambitious scope of this focussed exhibition using content primarily from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

The exhibition is curated to attempt to tie together the multiple threads of Austrian design movements, Oriental design, primitivism, Communist design, Italian Futurism, French Cubism, World War I, Fauvism and Modernism, as well as the New York Gilded Age, into a narrative defining art deco. Needless to say, this is not simple.

Some of the most impressive exhibits are the Art deco furniture, jewellery, installed foyer from the Strand Palace Hotel. My personal favorites were the highly streamlined cars, which I won’t spoil for you.

The exhibition, if you are in Melbourne or Australia, is definitely worth a visit. If it has a flaw, perhaps it overemphasized Art Deco’s roots in Orientalism and primitivism, and under emphasized the importance of the smooth flowing lines of the machine, to the Art Deco movement.

Interestingly, in relation to my writing in the Global Innovation Review 2007, Vienna and Paris are tremedously important in the Art Deco movement with other cities such as New York and London.

I will cover the exhibition in more considered depth for my work, but needless to say it was thoroughly enjoyable. I recall Art Deco, and my fascination with it both as a designer, and in the distant past in University in Tasmania.

The exhibition opens to the public tomorrow until 5th October 2008, leaving plenty of time to see the exhibition at NGV International St Kilda Rd, Melbourne.

Go and see it. You will enjoy it. I’ll return, despite the fact I have seen in person numerous Art Deco and related pieces in original contexts in Paris, London, New York, Vienna, around Australia, and globally in many places. Some elements are still visible overseas in their original context.

But there’s a narrative here, in one place, and even if I personally don’t entirely agree with the story, it is visually spectacular, making it well worth a visit.

Christopher Hire.