Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media

by Anca I. Lasc (Editor), Georgina Downey (Editor), Mark Taylor (Editor)

Overview

Designing the French Interior traces France's central role in the development of the modern domestic interior, from the pre-revolutionary period to the 1970s, and addresses the importance of various media, including drawings, prints, pattern books, illustrated magazines, department store catalogs, photographs, guidebooks, and films, in representing and promoting French interior design to a wider audience. Contributors to this original volume identify and historicize the singularity of the modern French domestic interior as a generator of reproducible images, a site for display of both highly crafted and mass-produced objects, and the direct result of widely-circulated imagery in its own right. This important volume enables an invaluable new understanding of the relationship between architecture, interior spaces, material cultures, mass media and modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857856593
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/22/2015
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Anca I. Lasc is Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Design at Pratt Institute, New York City, USA. Her work focuses on the invention and commercialization of the modern French interior and on the development of the profession of interior designer in the nineteenth century. She has published articles in Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture and the Journal of Design History and has presented at numerous conferences, including those organized by the College Art Association, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Society for French Historical Studies.

Georgina Downey is an independent scholar and Visiting Fellow in the Graduate Art History Program at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She lectures on a sessional basis at the South Australian School of Art and the University of Adelaide, and she has recently served on the Board of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. Her writings have appeared in Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2013), the proceedings of the Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association (IDEA) Conference, Brisbane 2010, theAustralian and New Zealand Journal of Art, the Journal of Australian Studies, the Journal of Australian Cultural History, Broadsheet, Artlink and Photofile. She is the editor of the recently published collection of commissioned papers entitled Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns(Bloomsbury, 2013).

Mark Taylor was Professor of Architecture at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. His primary research focus was the history and theory of the modern architectural interior with an emphasis on cultural and social issues. He published several books including Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (2006), Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2013), Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2018). He was co-editor of Domesticity under Siege: When Home isn't Safe (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022) with Georgina Downey and Terry Meade.

Table of Contents

French Connections: The Modern Interior and Mass Media, Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor

Section 1: Sex, Dreams, and Desires: The Perversions of the Modern Interior
1. Impolite Reading and Erotic Interiors in Eighteenth-Century France, Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor, University of Adelaide and University of Newcastle, Australia
2. Intimate Vibrations: Inventing the Dream Bedroom, Fae Brauer, University of East London, UK
3. Angels and Rebels: The Obsessions and Transgressions of the Modern Interior, Anca I. Lasc, Pratt Institute, USA
4. Machines and Monsters: The Modern Decadent Interior as Spectacle in Huysmans's À Rebours, Emilie Sitzia, Maastricht University, Netherlands
5. La Maison Suspendue: Imaginary Solutions for an Everyday Domestic Machine, Peter Olshavsky, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

Section 2: Aesthetics, Anxiety, and Identity: Reproducing a Decadent Domesticity
6. The Interiorization of Identity: Portrait Busts and the Politics of Selfhood in Pre- and Early Revolutionary France, Ronit Milano, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev , Israel
7. A Portable Keyhole into the Fictional Apartment Building: The Interiors of Félix Vallotton and Émile Zola, Karen Stock, Winthrop University, USA
8. The Fin-de-siècle Poster: A Healthy Modern Stimulus in the French Interior, Katherine Brion, University of Michigan, USA
9. Mode of a Modern Muse: Fashion and Interior in Édouard Vuillard's Paintings of Misia Natanson, Jess Berry, Griffith University, Australia
10. The Decadent Interior as Modern Lesbian Aesthetic, Elizabeth Melanson, University of Delaware, USA
11. Mallet-Stevens, Modern Design and French Cinema, Nieves Fernández Villalobos, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain

Section 3: Intimacy, Longing and Performance: The Consumption and Display of the Celebrity Home
12. Staging Domesticity in La Revue Illustrée's Photo-Interviews: Belle Époque Celebrity Homes in the Periodical Press, Elizabeth Emery, Montclair State University, USA
13. Hôtel Baronne Salomon de Rothschild 1872-1878: The Imprint of a Legacy, Linda Stevenson and Susan Tate, University of Florida, USA
14. 'Un Bel Atelier Moderne': The Montparnasse Artist at Home, Louise Campbell, Warwick University, UK
15. Housing the New Dandy: Designing Lifestyle in Monsieur Magazine, 1920-1924, John Potvin, Concordia University, Canada
16. 'Fashions in Living': The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, 4, Route du Champs d'Entraînement, Paris, Peter McNeil, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
17. 'Si ma cuisine m'était comptée': Paris Match and the Salon des arts ménagers during the Fourth Republic, Guillaume De Syon, Albright College, USA

Index

Editorial Reviews

Focusing on the French period from pre-revolutionary times through the late 20th century, 17 essays from 19 contributors are divided into three sections addressing the importance of various media and their shaping of residential interiors. It delves into the contributions of drawings, prints, pattern books, illustrated magazines, department catalogs, guidebooks, and films in promoting French interior design to the rest of the world. A reasonable number of black-and-white photos and reprints of posters, drawings, and publications enhance the written word, but should not be the only reason for picking acquiring this tome. The primary audience appears to be not only students and professionals, but also anyone who has sought information about the influences of French interiors on residential design. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels.” - CHOICE

From the Publisher