Art Deco Worlds in a Tomb: Reanimating Egypt in Modern(ist) Visual Culture

"Art Deco Worlds in a Tomb: Reanimating Egypt in Modern(ist) Visual Culture": This article explores a particular strand of artistic modernism by considering a range of decoratively ornate Egyptian revival works of art and architecture. Fuelled by Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, the field of modern archaeology was able to bring back the ancient past in ways that created an uncanny telescoping of time. Inspired by this event, many Egyptian revival art deco artifacts seemed highly performative in ways that at once revived late nineteenth-century decadent tendencies and participated in some of the more fantastic aspects of the early twentieth-century mass media and entertainment industries. The objects considered include: Egyptian costumes designed by Sonia Delaunay, the "Nile Nights Idea" of Fanchon and Marco, a Cartier vanity case, a Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin, and Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. Such art deco Egyptian objects appear to have functioned much like stage props, conjuring up imaginary mises-en-scène that enabled their users to indulge in temporal and spatial flights of fancy, including some limited forms of role-playing. While leading modernist ideologues such as Le Corbusier and Michael Fried have dismissed historical revival styles and theatrical tendencies as retrogressive, this article argues that they generated a heterotopian spatial and temporal compression and a visual mobility that have more recently been recognized as key components of western cultural modernity. Seen in this light, the paradigm of "the world in a tomb" seems to have at least as much cultural resonance as Le Corbusier's "white ripolin walls".