The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s

The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is the first major museum exhibition to focus on American taste in art and design during the dynamic years of the 1920s and early 1930s. After the First World War, American money and culture helped transform the global marketplace. The United States became the leading marketplace for innovative architecture, interior decoration, decorative art, fashion, music, and film. With the map of Europe redrawn and social mores redefined, creative influences merged. Talent and craftsmanship, urbanity and experimentation flowed back and forth across the Atlantic, with an influx of European émigré designers coming to America and a rush of American creative talent traveling and studying abroad. Against a backdrop of traditional historicist styles, a new language of design emerged to define an era of innovation and modernity—the Jazz Age—capturing the pulse and rhythm of the American spirit.

The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.