Virtual tour

Manhattan

Ruth Reeves: 'Manhattan', furnishing fabric.	Horace Taylor: 'The Royal Mail Line to New York', poster.	Edward Steichen: 'Spectacles'.

The impact of Art Deco in America was extensive and profound. Knowledge of the new style spread rapidly as Europeans emigrated to the US and American designers travelled to Europe.

European models of design were quickly superseded as designers strove to 'Americanize' the style, adapting it to cheaper materials, machine production and American social habits.

In their search for American imagery, artists and designers turned to the modern American city for evocative symbols of progress and modernity. Products of the 1920s building boom, the towering new skyscrapers of Manhattan, with their characteristic set-backs, became recurrent motifs in designs for textiles, tableware and furniture. They also appeared in photography, painting and the backdrops for Hollywood films.

For one leading émigré designer, the Austrian-born Paul Frankl, 'the skyscraper was a more vital contribution to the field of modern art than all the things done in Europe put together'.

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