Wireless link to golden past

[AusradioSearch http://www.ausradiosearch.com/]

A radio shaped like the Empire State Building and iconic Sydney
landmarks show art deco's timeless appeal, writes Sherrill Nixon.

Peter Sheridan can see the best qualities of the art deco era in the
streamlined form of a colourful Bakelite radio.

It is all there - a sense of joy and freedom emerging after World War
I and the Great Depression, a leap away from the fussiness and
stuffiness of the Edwardian and Victorian times, the emancipation of
women and the beginnings of consumerism and design in the home.

Sheridan's obsession with Bakelite radios of the 1930s and '40s began
more than a decade ago when he spotted some old models in a London
shop. Now his Elizabeth Bay apartment is filled with Australia's best
collection of them, 160 displayed in all their technicolour glory.

Four of Sheridan's finest are about to travel south for the most
sweeping exhibition ever staged by the National Gallery of Victoria.
Art Deco 1910-1939 will showcase more than 300 works across all fields
of art deco including painting, photography, fashion, jewellery, film,
architecture, household objects, book bindings and furniture. The
dazzling glass and chrome foyer of London's Strand Palace Hotel has
been restored for the exhibition, and the gallery's walls and doors
will be removed to manoeuvre a 1937 Cord 812 Westchester sedan into
the building.

The exhibition has been reprised from that mounted by London's
Victoria & Albert Museum in 2003 - the museums's most popular show to
this day - with an additional section devoted to art deco in
Australia.

Sheridan is delighted to offer his radios, including a prized green
Empire State Fisk radiolette and matching cigarette box made by AWA in
Sydney in 1936, as an example of how art deco took the world by storm
and pervaded so many aspects of life.

"My passion is the cabinet and the style of radio because they reflect
so many unifying themes that occurred around the '30s and '40s,"
Sheridan says.

"Bakelite was the first synthetic plastic, so for many people this was
the first piece of plastic in their home [and] for many people this
was the first piece of art deco styling. I think the style is clean;
it has a sort of timeless appeal. It's such a pleasure to see the
radios as if they have just appeared off the factory line. They are
infinitely lovely to fondle and touch and run your hand over."

While the radios Sheridan and his partner, Jan Hatch, collect are
mostly of the streamlined variety associated with the later American
take on art deco (a term that was not coined until the 1960s), the
exhibition will illustrate just how eclectic and contradictory the
style was.

Influences included all things Egyptian but especially the discovery
of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922, the ancient cultures of Meso-America
whose terraced ziggurats so inspired America's architects, and Africa
and the East for their exotic motifs.

The resulting art deco spectrum ranges from the ornamental and
outrageous to the geometric and sleek. It encapsulates the age of
transportation and communication, the flapper and the Hollywood siren,
the skyscraper and interior design.

It is so far-reaching that even the National Gallery of Victoria's
curators say they were surprised - and perhaps not entirely convinced
- about some of the objects encompassed by art deco.

But Kirsty Grant, the gallery's senior curator of Australian art, says
that has been part of the fun. "We all have an idea of what we think
art deco is, and this show is going to confirm that, but it's also
going to broaden it."

After tracing art deco from its roots in Paris, where it was first
truly defined, at the Paris Exposition in 1925, to its global
dominance, the exhibition turns to the style's impact in Australia.

Sydney features strongly as the city most obviously touched by art
deco, from the Hayden Orpheum cinema in Cremorne to the apartments of
Potts Point, pubs and milk bars on street corners to the Anzac
Memorial in Hyde Park. The latter, the creation of C. Bruce Dellit, is
regarded as one of the masterworks of Australian art deco
architecture.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932, is another art deco icon,
with its solid pylons stepped back pyramid-style and its enormous
sunrise-shaped arch. Several Harold Cazneaux photographs of the bridge
illustrate its significance.

And then there is the glamorous Wunderlich showroom, one of
Australia's most direct links to the 1925 Paris Exposition that
heralded the beginning of art deco's global spread.

Ernest Wunderlich visited the Paris event four years before he set up
the showroom in Redfern ("at most seven minutes from the GPO", the
promotional material says) with his brothers Alfred and Otto. The
showroom was the height of contemporary style and one of Australia's
first examples of art deco interior design.

The building was torn down in the 1970s, but the Powerhouse Museum
rescued some of the interior, including several sunburst-pattern
windows and glazed terracotta and bronze ornamental pillars.

One of the pillars is included in the National Gallery of Victoria
show. The gallery has high hopes for the exhibition, believing that
art deco's charm will pull crowds from Melbourne and beyond.

"I think that's why art deco has such broad appeal; it appears
everywhere from grandma's kitchen canisters to war memorials," Grant
says. "Deco is more obvious in Sydney [than Melbourne]. Sydney has
always been a city I associate with style and ... at that time it was
much more forward thinking.

"[Sydneysiders] should come because they live with art deco every day,
but this exhibition is going to illustrate where it comes from. They
will see very clearly how Australia was up to the moment, that what
was happening internationally was happening here very soon after."