The Modern Interior

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desire to sever art’s links with lived reality, and to lift it to a level above
that of fashionable taste and the commercial system of exchange (an
unfulfilled aspiration, of course), the long-term effect was a new direction
for the lived-in modern interior through the twentieth century. The
absorption of the interior into a sequence of modern art movements
served to transform it, both theoretically and actually, from a visual,
material and spatial reality into an abstract concept. That new direction
of travel had two distinct manifestations. Firstly, in the work of the Dutch
De Stijl artists, the interior became part of a highly abstracted redefinition
of space that took place, in the first instance, in two dimensions
on the painted canvas, but which was subsequently reintroduced into
three dimensions in the form of architectural models and constructions.
Secondly a number of Modernist architects, inspired by the work of the
Cubists and the Constructivists, began to see the creation of architecture,
and of the interior, as being synonymous with the abstract manipulation
of space.
A set of collaborations between artists and architects characterized
the developments that took place in The Netherlands in the years immediately
after the First World War. The result was the emergence of a new
definition of the interior and of the furniture items within it. Those
artists and architects established their collaborations, in broad terms,
upon the premise that painting and architecture were two very distinct
and different disciplines that could, nonetheless, complement each other
through the relationship of colour’s potential for spatial construction. 6
The Dutch architect, Bart van der Leck, was a key protagonist in those
collaborations. He had begun his career as an applied artist in the 1890s
and he acted as an important bridge between the ideas of the English Arts
and Crafts architects and designers and the work of the De Stijl group of
which he was a member. He subsequently worked on a range of architectural
projects with the Amsterdam-based architect H. P. Berlage. The
artist Theo van Doesburg worked with the architects Jan Wils and J.J.P.
Oud, who were also both heavily influenced by Berlage. Another applied
artist and painter, Vilmos Huszár, collaborated with the architect Piet
Klaarhamer in the development of a number of sophisticated ideas
about the difference between the decorative and the plastic arts. He also
ventured into furniture design. Piet Zwart, another De Stijl artist with an
Arts and Crafts background, also took an interest in interiors and made
a significant contribution to exhibition design. His designs were temporary,
highly branded structures, intended as frames for the commodities