Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse (original) (raw)
The nineteenth century -the Era of the Interior -witnessed the steady displacement of art from the ceilings, walls, and floors of aristocratic and religious interiors to the everyday spaces of bourgeois households, subject to their own enhanced ornamentation. Following the 1863 Salon des refuses, the French State began to channel mediocre painters into the decorative arts. England, too, launched an extensive reform of the decorative arts, resulting in more and more artists engaged in the production and design of complete interiors. America soon followed. Present art historical scholarship -still indebted to a modernist discourse that sees cultural progress to be synonymous with the removal of ornament from both utilitarian objects and architectural spaces -has not yet acknowledged the importance of the decorative arts in the myriad interior spaces of the 1800s. Nor has mainstream art history reckoned with the importance of the interior in nineteenth-century life and thought. Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, including art and design historians, historians of the modern interior, interior designers, visual culture theorists, and scholars of nineteenth-century material culture, this collection of essays studies the modern interior in new ways. The volume addresses the double nature of the modern interior as both space and image, blurring the boundaries between arts and crafts, decoration and high art, two-dimensional and three-dimensional design, trompe-l'oeil effects and spatial practices. In so doing, it redefines the modern interior and its objects as essential components of modern art.
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Designing the French Interior traces France's central role in the development of the modern domestic interior, from the pre-revolutionary period to the 1970s, and addresses the importance of various media in representing and promoting French interior design to a wider audience. Contributors to this original volume identify and historicize the singularity of the modern French domestic interior as a generator of reproducible images, a site for display of both highly crafted and mass-produced objects, and the direct result of widely-circulated imagery in its own right. To this end, a variety of media and representational techniques are discussed side by side, including drawings, prints, pattern books, illustrated magazines, department store catalogues, photographs, guidebooks, and films. Structured into three parts and including chapters by leading scholars addressing a wide range of subjects, this book is intended to broaden understanding of French interiors, from historical, theoretical and practice-based perspectives, and provides an invaluable new understanding of the relationship between architecture, interior spaces, material cultures, mass media and modernity.
From Ornament to Object. Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (Yale University Press, 2012)
In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, humble objects of everyday life—from crockery and furniture to clothes and tools—began to receive critical attention in relationship to architecture. Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism. Rather than the well-known story in which an absorption of technology and mass production created a radical aesthetic that broke decisively with the past, Payne argues for a more gradual shift, as the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken over by objects of daily use. As she demonstrates, the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier should not be seen only as the ignition point of modernism, but also as the culmination of a conversation about ornament and what constitutes architectural eloquence that goes back to the Renaissance. Payne looks beyond the “usual suspects” of philosophy, industry and science and identifies theoretical catalysts for architecture’s shift of attention from ornament to object in fields as varied as anthropology and ethnology; art history and the museum; and archaeology and psychology.
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