Newsnight Review discussed Art Deco 1910-1939 - a huge new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Watch the whole programme

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH:
It was a very good exhibition. I enjoyed it. I thought it seemed to be about the decorative arts as a whole between 1925 and 1940, not exclusively about Art Deco, which is more a style in popular culture and not a house style.

LAWSON:
That's something that they have done before in an art nouveau exhibition. They go all over the place. Suddenly they are in 1850s Japan, and there are often tenuous connections, aren't they?

SAUMAREZ SMITH:
In a way, the whole of room one is what comes before. The whole of room two is about the 1925 exhibition all over the world which is not really Art Deco because it is completely different in Sweden to what it is in Czechoslovakia and Japan. It's only in the third room that you get the real Art Deco.

LAWSON:
They make the interesting point that it's something associated with the rich, particularly in France, but then in America it was mass production. It came out of the Depression.

TOM PAULIN:
Yes. Both in America and in Britain, it becomes intensely democratic. There are all sorts of wonderful things in the exhibition, but it's a long foot-note to the great Art Nouveau exhibition they had in the year 2000. In fact they cut their links with art nouveau in this exhibition and don't point to the links there are. Artists like Joseph Hoffmann or furniture designers, strong links, Rene mackintosh, for example. You can see the links between art Nouveau and art deco. I am worried about that. But at the same time, it will look a bit like Bauhaus with curves and semi-circles. Then you start to think, "Actually there is something very poignant about this." It's like 20 years. It knows it's going to end in 1939. Poignantly, with terrible pathos, knowing it's soon going to be over. So it's the long weekend between the two wars.

LAWSON:
Although there is the poignancy there, it's a very feel-good exhibition. Some of the work is quite dazzling. They play music in the background. Did it make you feel good?

BONNIE GREER:
I used to collect deco. If you are down or upset, this is the place to go. The V & A does this kind of show exquisitely. It is good enough to eat. I want to go back again. Each room is a delight in itself. It gives you the kind of feeling that deco itself was meant to give. There are three killer pieces that I love. The beautiful silver Maharaja bed. There is the foyer of the Strand Hotel and there is the lovely streamline automobile that won the Grand Prix in South Africa in 1938. It is that lovely sort of feeling of luxury, and also exquisite beauty that I think the show is about.

SAUMAREZ SMITH:
I thought the industrial design was wonderful. I thought the Maharaja's bed was hideous!

GREER:
I loved it.

PAULIN:
But the digital clock was beautiful. A beautiful dinky object. All sorts of useful, consumer objects. It's early Habitat, in away, but more fun.

GREER:
The most profound thing is the point that the exhibition makes about how the African body actually exemplified that idea of the modern. That in fact the shape of the body itself was the modern. There is a film of Josephine Baker, that isn't the best kind of film...

PAULIN:
Were you not worried by that?

GREER:
What do you mean worried?

PAULIN:
I saw a documentary earlier this week which said it all came from Josephine Baker but they were obsessed with putting the primitive and the modernism together.

GREER:
It's the orientalness. You take the shape and the stance of African art. They took the shape and idea. Remember, Africa was away from this whole idea of Europe, and the lost Europe. Africa as modern, as the place to look to, on that level it was quite profound.

LAWSON:
They wanted to be populist but to be properly scholarly. Do they bring that off?

SAUMAREZ SMITH:
I think they do. It tends to concentrate on house style, because that's the nature of the V & A collection. The thing I find, like Art Nouveau, is you look at the bottom of the label and you see an incredible amount comes from the V & A collection.