The Modern Interior

a woman in the mid 1930s – she positioned a huge mirror with a rococo
frame made of plaster over the fireplace. 45 Such strategies served to align
those interiors much more closely with European developments and to
radicalize the idea of the period room in the us.
In spite of those striking innovations the tensions that had existed
in the years before 1939 between architects and interior decorators over
the right to design and control interior spaces in buildings, in both the
private and the public spheres, reached a climax in the 1940s. The tension
was caused by architects’ fears of becoming feminized and of being linked
to trade rather than to a profession. They sought universal solutions and
dismissed the lady decorators as untrained and working through intuition
alone. 46 By the mid-twentieth century the idea of facilitating selfexpression
and of constructing feminine identity through the interior
was well established, however. It placed the work of the lady decorators
in direct opposition to the male architectural approach to the design of
the interior. As a result, in the words of one writer, ‘by the 1940s [inter -
ior] design was professionalized and colonized by architects and the
emerging brand of industrial designer. A new model emerged which was
opposed to . . . the feminized amateur practice which dominated interior
decoration in the inter-war period.’ 47
The abundance of mass-mediated, modern decorative interior
styles available in the marketplace by the middle years of the twentieth
century provided consumers, at most levels of society, with an opportunity
to select from a range of modern identities and to follow de Wolfe’s
1913 advice. Given that they were nearly all made up of mass-produced
and mass-disseminated components, and reproduced in mass circulation
magazines, the move from individual self-expression in the home to
collective expression in leisure and other public sphere activities did not
involve a huge transformation. Whether in the home or in public spaces,
interiors were very likely to be have been influenced by the aspirational
styles depicted in Hollywood films and in the pages of home-oriented
magazines. Through the agency of the mass media, therefore, self expression
was rapidly transformed into a more collective expression of the age,
and what had once been private became overtly public.
As the first section of this book has demonstrated, by engaging so
profoundly with so many of modernity’s defining themes, bourgeois
domesticity played a fundamental role in the formation of the modern
interior, although it was visually transformed by the plethora of modern
styles it embraced in the period between 1850 and 1939. It also infiltrated 109