The Modern Interior

A backcloth for a store window display of furniture, illustrated in a store window display
manual, 1925.
and showed only modern designs at that time. 17 The president of New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert W. de Forest, became the
chair man of the store’s advisory committee, thereby giving that commercial
project a level of cultural validation. 18
Many other American stores were quick to follow Macy’s lead and
displayed rooms filled with designs by European ‘masters’, such as the
German Bruno Paul, and the Italian Gio Ponti. The appeal of the room
setting over individualized items of furniture undoubtedly lay in its
strong visual impact and its ability to evoke an idealized version of
‘reality’. It also suggested a lifestyle. The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, so
beloved of early twentieth-century designers, had, by the 1920s, been
transformed by store designers into a selling tool. In the 1930s Mary, the
wife of the designer Russel Wright, devoted limitless energy to selling her
husband’s aluminium ware. She undertook live demonstrations in stores
using real food as props, thereby sustaining a commercial tradition that
had been in place in American stores since the early century. In 1950 the
Wrights published a book together titled Guide to Easier Living in which
they explained that ‘Good informal living substitutes a little headwork 63