The Modern Interior

tion at London’s Fine Art Society, displayed in a setting that contained
‘yellow velvet curtains – pale yellow matting – yellow sofas and little
chairs – lovely little table – own design – with yellow pot and Tiger Lily’.
The exhibit demonstrated the significance that Whistler bestowed on both
the domesticity and the theatricality of the space in which his art was
shown. 3 In 1912 a group of avant-garde French artists exhibited a similar
preoccupation when they created the Maison Cubiste at the Paris Salon
d’Automne of that year. Although its facade and three interior spaces
were masterminded by the decorator André Mare, in reality they were the
result of a collaboration of a group of twelve artists associated in various
ways with Cubism. 4 Works by Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye,
Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Albert
Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and Paul Vera were displayed within the house.
The interiors were also filled with eclectic collections of brightly coloured
furniture and furnishings from different moments in French history. Un
salon bourgeois was also included. The intention may have been to subvert
the Art Nouveau Gesamtkunstwerk and to present, in its place, a
more fragmented, cacophonous and discordant interior that paralleled
the strategies of the Cubist painters. 5 It could also have been a result of
the lack of equivalence between what was considered progressive in the
world of fine art and what counted as the ‘state of the art’ in the area of
interior decoration at that time. In 1912 the two areas still inhabited parallel
universes. Within a couple of years, however, that was to change and
they were to move much more closely together.
After 1914 a number of closer alignments between art and architecture,
and by extension the interior, were evident. Indeed the interior was
drawn into the heart of the artistic avant-garde’s search for new forms
and concepts. At that time artistic ‘knowledge’ became, increasingly, the
exclusive terrain of avant-garde artists who sought to distance themselves
from the everyday world of taste and status, and to inhabit a more
rarefied, conceptual domain. Their interest was in abstraction rather than
in narrative, representation, ornamentation or social display. They felt
that art should depend upon its own internalized conceptual world and
relinquish any dependency on lived-in spaces. In their determination to
include architecture within their remit, however, they were forced to
embrace the idea of the interior, both idealized and realized.
The transformation of the modern interior in that context began
as an intellectual and ideological exercise. Early projects were rarely realized
as spaces for occupancy. Ironically, however, given the avant-garde’s 169