The 1920s Archive — The Jazz Age

The 1920s Archive — The Jazz Age

A Growing Archive

A mixed archive combining photography and graphic work. New material is added as digitization and research continue — this page grows with the archive. future were in the same room.

Photography — Contents

NYC Art Deco — Manhattan's commercial lobbies documented as complete artistic environments — elevator doors as allegorical sculpture, bronze grilles encoding symbolic programs, polychrome ceilings merging ancient and modern. Decorative cycles by Chambellan, Glinsky, and Bach.

The Bugatti Heritage Archive spans five bodies of work: factory drawings, studio photography, documentary reportage, posters, and printed literature. The factory drawings were reproduced in 1990 at Campogalliano before disappearing — they may be the only surviving record. Studio photography of the cars was commissioned by Franco Maria Ricci for Divina Bugatti, 1991 — two editions of 5,000 copies, both sold out. A second session, two decades later, documented the meeting between Roberto Bigano and the cars again — the museum and the meeting.

Available Stories — Photography Section

• The City of Opportunity — Art Deco Grilles, Chanin Building, 1929
  New York, 1929 — A City at Its Peak, Casting Its Ambitions in Bronze.
• Art Deco Elevator Panels — Fred French Building (1927) — Glinsky & Bach
  Eight gilt bronze panels — Industry, Commerce, Finance, and Building — conceived as a unified iconographic program.
• When Babylon Met Fifth Avenue — Ives & Glinsky's Fred French Building, 1927
  One architect's obsession with ancient Babylon. One sculptor's mastery in bronze. A New York landmark unlike any other.
• Divina Bugatti. A Timeless Legend Celebrated in a Timeless Book
  Franco Maria Ricci's most celebrated automotive book — photographed by Roberto Bigano at the Musée National de l'Automobile, Mulhouse, 1991.
• Bugatti Masterpieces of 1920s and 1930s. By Roberto Bigano
  Two sessions, two decades apart — the museum and the meeting.

Graphic— Contents

Advertisements, covers, editorial plates, and graphic design from the height of the Jazz Age. Anne Harriet Fish — illustrator for Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar — defined the graphic wit of high society across two continents. All pages of High Society — her masterpiece — are in the archive.

Additional illustrators represented include Gluyas Williams and other contributors to the American and British illustrated press of the 1920s. A growing section not yet organized in Stories includes a selection of restored covers from Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and the Chicagoan.

Available Stories — Graphic Section

• American 1920s High Society's lifestyles, as seen by Anne Fish
  Illustrations by Anne Fish. Texts by Dorothy Parker and George S. Chappell. Vanity Fair, 1914–1920.
• Flirting, Engagement, Weddings & Divorce in 1920s High Society
  Fish and Parker on love, marriage, and the divorce special.
• Social Events in 1920s High Society. By Fish
  Fish on theatre, opera, country houses, and the social calendar.
• Abdulla Cigarettes 1921. Mélisande à Monte-Carlo — Anne Fish
  Four series. Four protagonists. One unmistakable face.
• Gluyas Williams Cartoons — Ourselves as Others See Us (1928)
  The complete run on Cosmopolitan, 1928 — the only merged reproductions known to exist.
• Bugatti Posters
  Cassandre, Dudovich, Vincent, Geo Ham — the finest graphic artists of the era, commissioned by Bugatti.
• Bugatti Catalogs and Literature — 1920s and 1930s
  Sales literature from Molsheim — spare, original, and entirely their own.

High-Resolution Files & License

High-resolution files, offered with a royalty-free license and prepared for editorial use, research, and large-format reproduction.