Interiors and Identities

1980s studies of interiors

The body of scholarly work on interiors that exists today emerged in the late 1980s. On one level, its genesis was symptomatic of a post-modern historical and theoretical sensibility which moved away from high culture and the modernist Zeitgeist. The latter’s commitment to a link between built structures and social and political change was replaced by a concern with identity politics and everyday life. More focus was placed on meaning than on form and, because they both reflected and helped form everyday identities, a spotlight inevitably fell on interiors.

As it emerged in the UK, the scholarship on interiors represented a convergence of several different disciplinary shifts. Early studies were undertaken by museum curators who worked within the fields of art history and the decorative arts, and who had prioritised individual artefacts over assemblages. Peter Thornton’s 1984 book, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 1620-1920,² was written while he was the Keeper of Furniture and Woodwork at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and Clive Wainwright’s Fig. 4 study, The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home, 1750-1850,³ which focused on interiors that contained objects from earlier periods, was published 1989. It was researched while the writer was employed as an authority on Victorian furniture in the same department as Thornton.

The domestic interior

It is significant that both Thornton and Wainwright focused on the domestic interior. In its modern incarnation that concept was arguably formed within their chosen historical periods and was undoubtedly selected because of its symbolic resonance and the richness of its visual and material contents. Above all their studies focused on taste formation in the domestic setting. The same subject also stimulated a body of work, produced in the 1990s and the early 2000s, undertaken by a range of historians for whom gendered identities were all-important. They saw the subject of the nineteenth-century middle-class home as the perfect vehicle for a discussion about the overlooked role of the housewife as a creator of interior decoration.

In her essay “A View from the Interior,” one of the first texts to adopt this approach, which was published in 1989, Alison Ravetz wrote that, “It is with interiors that women are most intimately connected.”⁴ My text, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (from which Chapter 1 is included here, commented by Laurence Mauderli and translated into French for the first time) was published in 1995. It was not written as a history of interiors but, because its main argument focused on the taste of amateur housewives, as expressed in their homes, had been overlooked by historians of modern design and architecture who had emphasised production over consumption and the isolated object over assemblages, the domestic interior was inevitably foregrounded. Many more books about domesticity and its spaces followed quickly afterwards: Thad Logan’s The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study of 2001, which was written from a humanities perspective, set out to demonstrate that the feminised material culture of the home constituted an important face of Victorian culture.⁵ Fig. 5 In 2006 historian Deborah Cohen offered a different argument, claiming that domesticity was not just the preserve of women but that “middle-class Victorian men were [...] also domestically minded,”⁶ although two years later art historian Judith A. Neiswander, whose book, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870-1914, sought to position the late nineteenth-century interior within a broad social, cultural and political frame, returned to the earlier argument devoting one chapter to 'The Cosmopolitan Interior and the Empowerment of Women.⁷

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of a virtual industry of books about the home, many of them, like the numerous television programmes made at the same time, directed at a popular audience. At a time of fragmented and marginalised public identities the private home seemed like a safe place. In 2000 academia responded to the trend in the form of the establishment of the Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior at London’s Royal College of Art. It was not only art, architectural and design historians and feminist historians who focused on the subject, however. Literary and film scholars also produced tomes about it. Diana Fuss’ 2004 study, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them for example, addressed ‘both the psychological and the architectural meanings of interior life’⁸ as well as the concept of interiority which preoccupied many scholars at that time, while Elizabeth Bronfen’s book of the same year, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema, adopted a more psychoanalytical approach.⁹

Modernism and the interior

Many of the studies of home that emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries located their discussions in the nineteenth century, the era in which that concept was seen to have its origin and when it was, arguably, at its most developed and culturally significant. In his 2006 book The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity,¹⁰ architectural historian, Charles Rice, invoked thoughts expressed in the 1930s by Walter Benjamin in which that cultural theorist had described the birth of the interior as coinciding with the arrival of the private individual in the early nineteenth century.¹¹

Other historians, however, whose interests focused on the early twentieth century, sought to examine what happened to domesticity once architectural and design modernism had become the dominant discourse. Christopher Reed’s 1996 edited book of essays, Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, for example, addressed that issue head on, in particular its implications for women, while Hilde Heynen and Gulsum Baydar’s 2005 compilation of essays–Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture–picked up the same baton but, in contrast to Reed, who had claimed that architects such as Loos Fig. 6 Fig. 7 and Le Corbusier were deeply hostile to the conventional understanding of home, which they associated with “sentimental hysteria and dusty conservatism,”¹² suggested that the situation was more complex and that certain French feminists, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous among them, saw a link between modernity and the feminine. Indeed, for Heynen and Baydar, “it [was] clear that modernity and domesticity cannot just be seen as oppositional.”¹³

Professionalisation and the interior

One of the signs of a desire to integrate the idea of the feminine into an expanded view of architectural and design modernism was the work that looked in depth at the designs of modernist women, among them Eileen Gray Fig. 8, Charlotte Perriand and Lilly Reich, who all created interiors at some point in their careers.¹⁴ The shift in interest from women as amateur decorators and consumers toward their role in professional practice was part of a general interest in professional interior design that emerged at the turn of the century. Those years saw numerous publications on the lives and works of the twentieth-century ‘lady decorators’–Eleanor McMillen, Nancy Lancaster, Sister Parish, Elsie de Wolfe, Dorothy Draper, Nancy McClelland, Syrie Maugham and Rose Cumming among them.¹⁵ The emphasis was on their taste, their social networks, their eye for business and their position outside the modernist canon. The lady decorators, the literature explained, occupied a particular social milieu and represented a parallel world to that of architectural and design modernism. Their focus was for the most part on the domestic sphere and they openly embraced the idea of the ‘decorative’, which had been in place since the eighteenth century and which the modernists were at pains to sidestep.

The public interior

In the early 2005 it became clear to historians that, in the years after 1945, modernist ideals had begun to infiltrate the world of the interior; that the term ‘interior designer’ had begun to replace that of ‘interior decorator’; and that there was a new emphasis on the creation of interior schemes for public sphere buildings. In response to that realisation a new account of the interior profession began to emerge. The collection of essays collated by Paula Lupkin and myself in 2018 –Shaping the American Interior: Structures, Contexts, Practices–for example, focused less on interior styles and more on the background to the emergence of a modern interior design profession and an educational structure that supported it.¹⁶ Recognising its shared roots in both the legacy of the lady decorators and in home economics, the book’s essays also acknowledged the impact of post-war modernism on the interior design profession. As Mark Hinchman explained,

The dynamics of the interiors business changed dramatically after World War II, when some women, either as interior designers or architects, started working on large commercial projects for firms that were themselves big corporate entities.¹⁷

The professional move from the domestic sphere to the public arena was partly about the large amount of money that was being spent in the latter; partly about a re-masculinisation of interior design; and partly about the fact that modernist architecture and design had largely eroded the distinction between the private and the public spheres. Moving freely between the two, designers began to create domestic interiors in public spaces (waiting rooms in dentists' surgeries) and work-related spaces in domestic settings (home offices). That erosion of boundaries re-defined the interior and complexified its gendered connotations.

It also stimulated academic historians and theorists to begin to think about the public interior for the first time and, in the decades around the turn of the century, several texts began to address the complexity of the relationship between the private and the public spheres which had seemed so clear cut in the mid-nineteenth century. In her 1994 text, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Beatriz Colomina explained how, through the work of the media, the private had become public and space was made more complex through its relationship with representation.¹⁸ I used the phrases ‘Inside Out’ and ‘Outside In’ to structure the text of my 2008 book, The Modern Interior and to demonstrate the increasingly close interrelationship, and confusion, between the concepts of privacy and publicity.¹⁹

In two books–Without and Within: Essays on Territory and the Interior of 2007, and The Public Interior as Idea and Project of 2016–Mark Pimlott was among the first scholars to address the public interior in depth. Following on from Augé’s earlier propositions, the former concerned itself with “the interiorisation of territory as effected and realised in the United States”²⁰ and with the idea that the interior spaces of airports, shopping malls and corporate buildings–ail of them scenes of consumption–were very similar to each other and, in effect, formed one continuous interior. In the 2016 text the author proposed six organising principles–the garden, the palace, the ruin, the shed, the machine and the network–which, he maintained, underpinned the development of what we now call the public interior.

The shift in the discussion about interiors from the home to the public space that occurred in the early twenty-first century was soon joined by a new concept that came to dubbed ‘interior urbanism.’²¹ Based on Pimlott’s concept of continuous interiors, it was also rooted in the idea that the city–especially the spaces of leisure and consumption that increasingly defined it–was becoming increasingly interiorised. Domesticity became part of that process of interiorisation wherever it was needed but was no longer clearly distinguishable from its public manifestations.

With the absence of a discrete discussion about domesticity in interiors scholarship the issue of gender difference and relations, which had informed earlier studies, became less overtly visible. Some would suggest that the discussion–like interior design itself had become masculinised and that the feminist drive behind early discussions about the idea of home had vanished from view. Seen from another perspective, however, the notions of privacy and publicity (however interwoven) retained their currency, which would suggest that the concept of gender difference had also not disappeared but had, rather, simply become more complex.

Design, intérieurs, identités

The essays in this research line this issue address and develop several of the ideas outlined above. Valérie de Calignon’s piece, ‘Interior Controversy, which sets the scene, examines the interior’s problematic relationship with architecture over time. The reproduced chapter from my 1995 book, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, has already been mentioned. Michela Bassanelli’s’“In Praise of Fabrics”: Italian Interior Design and its Women’ explores the relationship of the soft, interior with feminine culture, while Irene Cieerad’s essay ‘The Home Ideal of Autarky: A Social History of Domestic Comfort, Privacy and Sociability. The Example of The Netherlands’ focuses on the role of externally-generated services in the private domestic interior. Pat Wheaton’s ‘Charters (1936-1938): A House of Two Voices’ offers a case-study of an aristocratic British home, the exterior of which was designed by the man of the house and the decorative interior by the woman, while Elias Constantopoulos’ ‘“Home, will infect whatever you do”: A Tribute to Minutiae’ provides an account of the way in which furniture and furnishing of his own personal living space both reflect and form the identities of its inhabitants. Deborah Feldman’s essay, ‘The Tyranny of the Image. The Picture-Perfect Home’ explores the impact of the Airbnb phenomenon, while Philippe Rahm’s “Anthropocene Style: Decorative Art in the Age of Epidemics and Global Warming” focuses on the Anthropocene Style, a new functional decorative art that puts contemporary climate and health issues at the centre of aesthetic choices. Together these essays provide a fresh new framing for the complex subject, the ‘interior’, taking the field into new directions.

Bibliographie