Not at home : the suppression of domesticity in modern art and architecture

310 Pages·1996·20.745 MB·English

by  Christopher Reed

NOT AT HOME
The Suppression:
of Domesticity in Modern Art
and Architecture
Phy Christopher Reed oe
fi
NOT AT HOME
The Suppression of Domesticity in
Modern Art and Architecture
E:dited and Introduced by Christopher Reed
The notion of domesticity, itself an invention of the
modern age — the home, the family, privacy, comfort,
as opposed to the workplace — has been challenged
and ridiculed by modernist artists, architects and
designers. From 1859, when Charles Baudelaire’s
The Painter of Modern Life cast the modern painter as
‘a man of the crowd’ who curses the hours he must
spend indoors asleep when he could be out recording
‘the landscapes of the great city’, domesticity became
the antithesis of modernity. This attitude came to
define the avant-garde which envisaged modernism
as an iconoclastic and heroic odyssey, an adventure
of individuals with no time to spare for homelife
and housekeeping.
This book explores the relationship of modernism
and domesticity, a contested realm which, perpetually
invoked in order to be denied, has remained a crucial
though marginalized element of modernism. From
the Victorian period, through Aestheticism and the
Arts and Crafts Movement, in /in-de-siécle France and
Sweden and within the twentieth-century avant-
gardes of Paris, Vienna, London, Boston, Berlin
and New York, up to the present time, domesticity
and art, architecture and design are interwoven.
Today, after more than one hundred years of dispute,
the domestic is being re-evaluated and returned to a
position of cultural prominence, impelling us to look
back over the mainstream of modernism in an effort
to trace its hidden domestic subcurrents. This book,
with stimulating and highly original contributions
by leading historians of art and design, represents
the most coherent and considered investigation of
domesticity in visual culture. Through these essays,
the notion of home is freed from stereotypes of
sentimental nostalgia and emerges as a vital arena
of modern art — and of modern life.
With 91 illustrations
On the jacket (background photograph): Mark Twain House
Library, Hartford CT. This library, decorated by Louis C. Tiffany
and Associated Artists in 1881, was central to the Clemens family’s
domestic life.
Berkshire College of Art and Design
Raymond Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 6DF
Library
eTitele SNeot at home: the esupperessinon o f domesticity
in modern art _a nd architecture
Author REED Christopher (meyicte 70ie 103
To be returned on or before latest date stamped below
13 MAR 2007 :
09 may 2007
“ITHDP
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20 MAR 2018
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E:dited and Introduced by
Christopher Reed
NOT AT HOME
The Suppression of
Domesticity in Modern Art
and Architecture
With 91 illustrations
T&H
ELAM S cA NID ELD SON
Acknowledgments
Many of the essays in this volume are expanded versions of panel
presentations on the topic of “Domesticity and Modernism,” delivered at the
annual convention of the College Art Association in 1993. Thanks are due to
this organization’s staff and panel selection chairs for making this kind of
collaborative project possible. A Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities from the
University of Pennsylvania made possible the timely completion of this book.
Sharon Haar took time from her busy schedule to provide on-going help and
advice with the sections of the book dealing with architecture. The greatest
debt of thanks, however, is to the contributors, whose hard work is evident in
the essays, and to the families of the contributors, who facilitated that work in
a thousand invisible ways. No-one has done more to teach me about the
meaning(s) of home than my parents and my domestic partner, Christopher
Castiglia. It is to them—along with the parents, spouses, partners, children,
housemates, and other family members of all of the contributors—
that this work is properly dedicated.
570). O08
ect
Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback
is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent,
resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including these words being imposed
on a subsequent purchaser.
© 1996 Thames and Hudson Ltd, London
Text © Christopher Reed and the several authors
appearing in the Contents list opposite
“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kindergarten” by David Van Zanten reprinted from Architecture:A Place
for Women, edited by Ellen Berkeley and Matilda McQuaid (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press), pages 5 5—62, by permission of the publisher. © 1989.
“Homes for Cyborgs” reprinted with revisions from Anthony Vidler, TheA rchitectural Uncanny:
Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). © 1992 Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0—500—01692~—5
Printed and bound in Slovenia by Mladinska Knjiga
4
j Wk?
Ae
Contents
Introduction ChristophReere d
The Chic Interior and the Feminine Modern: Home Decorating
—
as High Artin Turn-of-the-Century Paris Lisa Tiersten
The Chromo and the Art Museum: Popular and Elite Art
Institutions in Late Nineteenth-Century America Michael
Clapper
a3
Model-Families: The Domesticated Studio Pictures of
ww
William Merritt Chase and Edmund C. Tarbell Linda J. Docherty 48
Psyche and Sympathy: Staging Interiority in the Early
Modern Home Susan Sidlauskas 65
The Ideal Swedish Home: Carl Larsson’s Lilla Hyttnas
“
Michelle Facos 81
Prank Lloyd Wright’s Kindergarten: Professional Practice
ON
and Sexual Roles David Van Zanten
92
“Hi Honey, ’'m Home”: Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen
and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic
Joyce Henri Robinson 98
Domesticity, Decoration and Consumer Culture: Selling Art
oo
and Design in Pre-World War I France Nancy /. Troy 113
Forgotten Ties: The Suppression of the Decorative in German
xo
Artand Theory, 1900-1915 Jenny Anger 130
“A Room of One’s Own”: The Bloomsbury Group’s Creation
of a Modernist Domesticity Christopher Reed 147
Homes for Cyborgs Anthony Vidler 161
Domestic Differences: Edith Farnsworth, Mies van der Rohe,
and the Gendered Body Alice T’ Friedman tp
Robert Rauschenberg’s Fabrics: Reconstructing Domestic Space
Lisa Wainwright oe
Contents
14 Master Bedrooms, Master Narratives: Home, Homosexuality,
and Post-War Art Kenneth E. Silver 206
1) Pop at Home Cécile Whiting PAPAS.
16 Vito Acconci’s Bad Dream of Domesticity Christine Poggi 237
17 Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernism
Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed
25
Notes 274
Bibliography
293
List of Illustrations
a)
Notes on the Contributors 300
Index
302
[ntroduction
CHRISTOPHER REED
A N\Getbenia often taken for granted, the idea of domesticity is an
invention of the modern age. According to the cultural historian
Walter Benjamin, it was in the early 1800s that, “for the first time the living
space became distinguished from the space of work.’’! If we isolate the
values that comprise the notion of domesticity — separation from the work-
place, privacy, comfort, focus on the family — we find that each has been
identified by historians as a defining feature of the modern age.
Domesticity, in sum, is a specifically modern phenomenon, a product of
the confluence of capitalist economics, breakthroughs in technology, and
Enlightenment notions of individuality.
When we think of modern art, however, we do not generally think of
domestic imagery or objects for the home, for in the arts the linkage of
domesticity and modernism has been obscured by another conceptual
invention of the nineteenth century: the idea of the “avant-garde.” As its
military-derived name suggests, the avant-garde (literally “advance guard’’)
imagined itself away from home, marching toward glory on the battlefields
of culture.* While, in fact, most makers of buildings, furniture, sculpture,
and paintings supplied the rapidly expanding market for domestic struc-
tures and decoration, these workers and their products did not meet avant-
garde definitions of “architecture” and ce “art”. From the Victorian
drawing-room with its étagéres full of trinkets to the twentieth-century
tract house with its mass-produced paintings, the home has been posi-
tioned as the antipode to high art. Ultimately, in the eyes of the avant-garde,
being undomestic came to serve as a guarantee of being art.
This book has a dual purpose: to analyze, in some historical detail, the
antagonism of twentieth-century art and architecture toward the values
associated with domesticity, and to explore alternatives to this trend. All but
two of the essays appearing here were specially commissioned for this
volume; each offers a detailed scholarly appraisal of some aspect of the
relationship between domesticity and modernism. As a preliminary to
these case studies, this introduction surveys the last century, documenting
the growing divergence of domesticity and modernism, despite — or
because of — their intertwined roots in turn-of-the-century culture.
The tendency for avant-garde artists and architects, along with their pro-
moters, to assert their accomplishments through contrast with domesticity
y
Tntroduction
has characterized modernism at least since Charles Baudelaire’s famous
defense of Impressionism, “The Painter of Modern Life.” Begun in 1859,
this essay cast the modernist painter as a fldneur, “a man of the crowd,” who
curses the hours he must spend indoors, when he could be out recording
“the landscapes of the great city.” It is significant that, despite the many
Impressionist paintings with domestic subjects, the movement is best
known for its treatment of landscapes and city scenes, supposedly rendered
on the spot by artists far from home and studio. As Griselda Pollock points
out in reference to the work of women Impressionists, “spaces of feminin-
ity’ (which she catalogs as dining-rooms, drawing-rooms, bedrooms, bal-
conies, terraces, and private gardens — in short, the spaces of domesticity)
were made subordinate to the theaters, nightclubs, cafés, and brothels that
constituted the urban pictorial realm of the male Impressionists. Pollock
argues that even when men turned to domestic subjects, their images “are
painted from a totally different perspective.” The men, she says, present the
home as spectacle to be witnessed by an audience of outsiders, rather than
“with a sureness of knowledge of the daily routine and rituals” that charac-
terizes the women for whom the domestic sphere was home-turf.* In this
book, Susan Sidlauskas analyzes the way anxiety and alienation are staged in
the composition of interiors by a number of male painters of the
Impressionist era, while Linda Docherty describes the mixed success of
two American Impressionists who attempted to bring together the spaces
of parlor and studio.
Perhaps because most architects’ careers begin with domestic commis-
sions, modernist architects have insisted even more vehemently than
modernist painters on their antipathy to the home. The historic rise and fall
of domestic values is the subject of architect Witold Rybezynski’s influen-
tial book, Home: A Short History of an Idea. He traces the phenomenon of
domesticity from a faint presence in the Middle Ages, through a florescence
in seventeenth-century Holland that lasted through the nineteenth century,
and finally to a crisis at the dawn of the twentieth century when the “dis-
tinctly unhomey” International Style aesthetic of what critics called the
“cold storage warehouse cube” came to dominate the most prestigious
ranks of architecture and design.”
Rybezynski cites the Viennese architect Adolf Loos as a pioneer in the
“process of stripping away, which is so characteristic of modern interiors.”
In a now-famous 1908 manifesto, Loos equated ornament with crime,
arguing that the tendency to decorate manifested the same impulses as
graffiti and tattooing, and that all were symptoms of degeneration,
inappropriate to a forward-looking modernism. In fact, despite their
stripped-down exteriors, the insides of Loos’s houses were often sumptu-
ous displays of materials and craft. Nevertheless, recent feminist analysis
has assessed Loos’s domestic interiors in much the same terms that Pollock
&