The Modern Interior

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within it as items of equipment, rather than as providers of comfort and
pleasure. Above all, as we have also seen, Le Corbusier and others aimed
to minimize the role of domesticity in the private dwelling. The influence
of ideas emanating from fine art on the interior had the effect, at the
progressive, avant-garde end of the spectrum, of reinforcing that mission
and of eliminating domesticity and the psychological associations that
went with it once and for all. Although in search of classless, gender
neutral (although they were, in effect, heavily masculinized) spaces which
were neither public nor private, a number of architects completely
redefined the modern interior at that time. In the 1920s in its pure form
the models they created were restricted to the exhibition and the world
of the intellectual elite, by the 1930s the popular ‘machine aesthetic’ inter -
ior had been absorbed into what by that time had become a generic
‘modern’ style, widely available in the marketplace.
Prior to the nineteenth century, adding art to the domestic interiors
of the wealthy, or to significant public spaces, had been a relatively straight -
forward process related to the power and status of ruling families and
of the church. By the second half of the nineteenth century the inclusion
of art in the interior was still one of the means of marking one’s level in
society, although by then that opportunity had been extended to the
middle classes. In his seminal 1979 study Distinction: A Social Critique of
the Judgement of Taste the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu elabor -
ated the role of ‘art’ in the context of modern consumer society demonstrating
how the ownership and display of ‘cultural capital’, that is the
acquisition of knowledge about art and other forms of high culture, and
the demonstration of that acquisition in the context of daily life, whether
through interior decor or the presentation of food on a plate, was one of
the key means by which the middle class distinguished itself from the
class immediately below it. 2 The avant-garde artists of the early twentieth
century sought to make artistic practice more self-referential and less
part of everyday life. As a result artistic ‘knowledge’ became more
difficult to acquire and increasingly powerful as a mechanism for achieving
‘distinction’. By the inter-war years that principle had been extended
to architecture, and, by implication, to the interior as well.
A merging of the worlds of fine art and the interior could already
be observed, on a number of different levels, in the last decades of the
nineteenth century. Several artists had involved themselves with the spaces
in which their work was displayed at that time. In 1883, for example,
fifty-one of James McNeill Whistler’s etchings were installed at an exhibi-