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Lot Essay
Jean Dunand's radio cabinet is a detailed and masterful interpretation of the modern and energetic spirit that defined the kinship that existed between Paris and New York during the late 1920s and 1930s. Compact, and designed to enclose the increasingly affordable table-top radios that, were by 1930, beginning to appear in many European homes, the lacquered and decorated case is supported on clustered gilt-metal uprights that introduce the language of architecture, most specifically the soaring skyscrapers of Manhattan that so engaged Parisian society.
However, it is the meticulously rendered surface of the doors that delivers, with carefully stylized motifs, an insight into the modern technological advances and liberated social behavior that united the two cities - most specifically those associated with the sound of Jazz. A series of stylized knobs and dials, surmounted by the bulb valves, reach towards the wrapped wires of the aerial - resonating with the energy of the transmission; zig-zag lines cross the skies, over an ocean, to deliver transatlantic birdsong to an attentive listener, most likely Josephine Baker, draped in stylized African batik prints, poised atop a landscape that is part the lush canopies of jungle, and part the rigid architectural massing of the modern city.
From France's colonies in the Congo, via Harlem, and back to Paris, jazz become the riotous soundtrack to liberty, and Josephine Baker - former Broadway chorus girl now transformed into glamorous Parisian siren - became the living emblem of that spirit.
However, it is the meticulously rendered surface of the doors that delivers, with carefully stylized motifs, an insight into the modern technological advances and liberated social behavior that united the two cities - most specifically those associated with the sound of Jazz. A series of stylized knobs and dials, surmounted by the bulb valves, reach towards the wrapped wires of the aerial - resonating with the energy of the transmission; zig-zag lines cross the skies, over an ocean, to deliver transatlantic birdsong to an attentive listener, most likely Josephine Baker, draped in stylized African batik prints, poised atop a landscape that is part the lush canopies of jungle, and part the rigid architectural massing of the modern city.
From France's colonies in the Congo, via Harlem, and back to Paris, jazz become the riotous soundtrack to liberty, and Josephine Baker - former Broadway chorus girl now transformed into glamorous Parisian siren - became the living emblem of that spirit.