The Modern Interior

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Georges Djo-Bourgeois, study for the ‘Studium Louvre’ Pavilion, exhibited at the
Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris, 1925.
Riemerschmid among them, and the famous Art Nouveau settings created
by Eugène Gaillard, George de Feure and others which were displayed
in the Samuel Bing pavilion. Austria also made its presence felt with,
among other displays, the Viennese Interior, a Gesamtkunstwerk designed
by Joseph Olbrich, and an Interior of a Pleasure Yacht created by the same
designer. 29 Other interiors were sponsored by the Parisian department
stores, Bon Marché among them, again in the Art Nouveau style. (The
pioneer American interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe, later recounted in
her autobiography that the last had been purchased by her friend, the
Marchioness of Anglesey, who, in turn, had passed on to her the eight -
eenth-century wooden wall panelling which it had displaced.)
Through the twentieth century the exhibition room set increasingly
became a commonplace, at least until the late 1950s. At the Turin 1902
exhibition the Italian designer Carlo Bugatti showed his dramatic interior
based on a snail’s shell, while Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret