SKU: 5100-1925-01-00-016 Categories: 1920s, Art Deco, Art Deco NYC, Photography

Frozen Fountain Decoration, inspired by Edgar Brandt's gates, exhibited at the 1925 Exposition in Paris. Madison Belmont Building, 183 Madison Avenue

Edgar Brandt's Frozen Fountain — Madison Belmont, New York, 1924

Name: Art Deco Frozen Fountain Decoration at Madison Belmont, NYC - Ikonographia
SKU: 5100-1925-01-00-016
Price: 95.00 EUR
Availability: InStock

First American Art Deco — The NYC Art Deco Archive

The frozen fountain motif on the Madison Belmont entrance was designed by French iron master Edgar Brandt. The motif — stylized water cascading in symmetrical curves — originated in Brandt's monumental gate at the 1925 Paris Exposition.

Here, in wrought iron with gold and bronze accents, it became the first major application of what would later be called Art Deco on an American building. The building itself was not in the new style. The decoration was the exception — and became the symbol.

Published in FMR Magazine, Winter Solstice 2024.

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Browse the NYC Art Deco Archive

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Edgar Brandt's Frozen Fountain — Madison Belmont, 1924

The Madison Belmont Building

The frozen fountain on the Madison Belmont entrance at 181 Madison Avenue was designed by Edgar Brandt — the foremost ironworker in France — and commissioned by the Cheney Brothers Silk Company for the building's first three floors. The motif, a stylized cascade of water in symmetrical curves, originated in Brandt's monumental gate at the 1925 Paris Exposition. Sixty tons of iron, accented with bronze and gold-colored brass. The building itself, designed by Warren & Wetmore — architects of Grand Central Terminal — was a transitional structure, its Neoclassical form carrying a detail that belonged to a different world entirely.

That detail became the argument. In wrought iron with gold and bronze accents, the frozen fountain was the first major application of what would become Art Deco on an American building. The building was not in the new style. The decoration was the exception — and became the symbol. The Madison Belmont facade and lobby were designated New York City landmarks in 2011.

NYC Art Deco Interiors — New York, 1924–1939

The decorative programs of Art Deco Manhattan — photographed in full and documented to primary sources.

Manhattan's commercial interiors of the late 1920s and 1930s were not incidental ornament. They were complete symbolic programs — conceived by architects, executed by sculptors and metalworkers, and designed to carry specific meaning. Bronze grilles, gilded elevator doors, painted vaults, and polychrome ceilings were not decoration added to architecture. They were the architecture.

Ikonographia documents these programs as they were intended to be read: in sequence, in context, and against the primary sources that define them. Sixty-five buildings photographed. Twenty photographs from this archive were published in FMR Magazine — Gotham Deco: Modern Metropolis. This Was Tomorrow — with an essay by Anthony W. Robins.

Historic Background

The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris set the terms. New York architects took the style and pushed it toward something different — taller, harder, more industrial. European glamour translated into verticality, machine-age materials, and the visual language of American commercial ambition.

The story begins in 1924. Edgar Brandt's frozen fountain on the Madison Belmont entrance — wrought iron with gold and bronze accents — was the first major application of what would become Art Deco on an American building. The motif had originated in Brandt's monumental gate at the 1925 Paris Exposition. It arrived in New York a year earlier. The building was not in the new style. The decoration was the exception — and became the symbol.