Eighteen years of research on two continents.
A highly acclaimed presentation in Paris at the World Congress on Art Deco.
A captivating Los Angeles story whose full scope has never been told…until now.
Join ADSLA Board Chairman Marc Chevalier for his North American debut of a presentation that some called the best and most visually beautiful at last year’s World Deco Congress. See and hear it inside the very place where much of it occurred: the Oviatt Building, a 1928 Art Deco jewel at the heart of our city.
In the 1930s, countless Hollywood movies glittered with Deco sets, props, and costumes. Film audiences around the world tended to assume that Los Angeles had been wedded to Art Deco since the style’s grand 1925 debut in Paris -- but they were mistaken. The road was slower, and the story behind it was lost and deliberately obfuscated. Creative genius, egotism, astonishing projects both open and hidden, and a self-aggrandizing lie which nearly buried it all for 80 years…this is how French Art Deco in its first, golden age, truly arrived in the City of the Angels.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
Currently the board chairman of the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles (ADSLA), Southern California historian Marc Chevalier researched, wrote, and produced THE OVIATT BUILDING, a 2008 documentary film about downtown L.A.’s first Art Deco skyscraper. In his research, Marc stumbled across an unknown web of connections between that building and the trailblazing 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris: a discovery which led to 18 years of further investigation. This will be Marc’s first U.S. presentation of his findings.