The short version. Deco is the most decorative this collection gets, and it stays the right side of kitsch because the decoration was structural: the fins, the teardrops and the speed lines were what designers believed fast should look like. These three are car artwork in that idiom, printed to order, and they are the ones that make a room look considered, not enthusiastic.
The three
Speed Record is a land-speed racer arrowing across the salt flats under radiating geometric sun rays. Record attempts were the decade's obsession and they produced the strangest-looking cars anybody has built, because nothing about them had to be practical. Machine-age glamour, held still.
Deco Metropolis takes the car into the architecture: an elegant coupe in front of stepped skyscrapers and a stylised moon, in midnight blue, gold and cream. This is the one that proves the point about cars and buildings, because you can't easily say which half of the picture is doing the work.
Deco Riviera is the holiday. An open roadster on the corniche above a geometric sea with a liner on the horizon, in the travel-poster idiom the decade invented. It's the easiest of the three to live with in a room people sit in.
Hanging deco
Deco is a strong decision, so these want space, not company. One of them centred on a wall does more than two of them side by side. Deco Metropolis takes a natural wood frame well, because the gold in its palette picks the wood up.
If the geometry appeals more than the glamour, 1930: The Roadster, one continuous line on cream, is the austere version of the same instinct. If the period is what you're after, not the styling movement, the vintage posters cover the same years in a different register. The wall handles size and framing.


