Paintings of Art Deco Porcelain

The international Art Deco style of the 1920s and 1930s was expressed not only in highly refined handmade objects, but also filtered down to popular mass-produced goods. A leader in this field was the Noritake porcelain company, based in Nagoya, Japan. Founded in 1904 by the Morimura Brothers, Noritake found a niche manufacturing inexpensive, colorful and stylish porcelains in Japan for the American and European markets. The firm’s design office was located in New York and headed by an Englishman, Cyril Leigh. The designs they created represent a kind of anthology of European design trends of the 1920s and ’30s, reinterpreted by Noritake: constructivist and biomorphic abstraction; folk art revival; 18th century and comedia del’arte pastiche; Wiener Werkstätte; Egyptomania; English “cottage ware;” and of course Japanoiserie. The international “new woman” of the 1920s was celebrated in her specifically Japanese incarnation, the Moga, who is often depicted daringly smoking a cigarette, or engaging in the fashionable Western sport of skiing.

These prints reproduce watercolor drawings of, or possibly for, these porcelain pieces.