What’s interesting about your choice? Well, a portrait is a genre that conveys an artist’s (and a viewer’s) attitude to a person, his or her values, life choices, as well as general understanding of the place and the role a person takes and plays in the rapid life, in history, and in the world generally. A realist will subject people to thorough… examination, he will single out and accentuate the typical images of people of the time; an impressionist will be excited about fleeting emotions, the appearances and the elusive features of the people he/she portrays; a romanticist will look for strong, violent people who elbow their way through history and are in constant fight with the world and their own self. Art Deco people are nothing like that. Originally the style of Art Deco developed following World War I, the period that cried for the way out of the unbearable reality, out of the social and economic turmoil and political ambiguity. The exalted women and young ladies in cleavage-baring dresses with elaborate hair, stylish gentlemen with expensive cigar cases, garden parties and pink teas in spacious, richly furnished interiors – all these people trying to escape from the sober reality into the easy glamorous vision of a life, the life where tomorrow may never indeed come. This is the type of fragile and desperate people looking at you from art deco portraits. As for the artistic peculiarities of the style, art deco portraits feature them in all the glory – the lavish ornaments, expensive materials, the tinsel of drapery and attire, exotic patterns that can be attributed to the influence of cubism, the broken lines and stepped constructions, the intense colour and accentuated colour contrasts.