The Materials of Shame: Decoration, Masculinity, and the Birth of Modern Interior Design

Abstract:

This essay revisits well-known figures, theories, and representations alongside new ones to thread together a narrative that betrays my dissatisfaction with the current state of design history. My malaise stems from a disavowal I have identified of the material and discursive forms of shame that I not only situate at the heart of my essay but are embedded in the historical foundation of the profession of interior decoration and design, and in design history. I make a case for the ways in which effeminacy, shame, and camp take up residence at the intersection of twentieth-century theories of decoration and design.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937).

2 By no means exhaustive; see, for example: Isabelle Anscombe, A Woman’s Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984); Judy Attfield, “Form/Female Follows Function/male: Feminist Critiques of Design,” in Design History and the History of Design, by John A. Walker (London: Pluto Press, 1987),199–225; Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, eds., A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (Women’s Press, 1989); Cheryl Buckley, “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design,” Design Issues 3, no. 2 (1986): 3–14; Sue Clegg and Wendy Mayfield, “Gendered by Design: How Women’s Place in Design is Still Defined by Gender,” Design Issues 15, no. 3, (Autumn 1999): 3–16; Beverly Gordon, “Woman’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age,” Winterthur Portfolio, 31, 4 (1996): 281–300; Juliette Kinchin, “Interiors: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the ‘Masculine’ and the ‘Feminine’ Room,” in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996): 12–29; Pat Kirkham (ed.), The Gendered Object (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Pat Kirkham, Women Designers in the USA 1900–2000 (The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2000); Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke (eds.), Women’s Places: Architecture and Design, 1860–1960 (New York: Routledge, 2003); Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: HarperCollins, 1995); Penny Sparke, Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (New York: Acanthus Press, 2005). In this context I might also include Peter McNeil’s survey essay “Designing Women: Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Decorator, c. 1890–1940,” Art History, 17, 4 (1994): 631–57.

3 Buckley, “Made in Patriarchy,” 3.

4 See Alice T. Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2010) and Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York: Abrams, 1998).

5 Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink, 105.

6 Lynn Meskell, Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class et cetera in Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 84.

7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1.1 (1993): 1–16, 13.

8 John Potvin, “The Pink Elephant in the Room: What Ever Happened to Queer Theory in the Study of Interior Design 25 Years On?” (Perspectives Article). Journal of Interior Design, 41, no. 1 (March 2016): 1–7.

9 José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8, no. 2 (1996): 7.

10 Nixon’s comments were taken from a May 13, 1971, conversation between the former American president, Richard Nixon, John D. Ehrlichman, and H. R. Haldeman in James Warren, “All the Philosopher King’s Men,” Harper’s Magazine 300, no. 1797 (February 2000): 22.

11 Adolf Loos, ([1908] 2002), “Crime and Ornament,” in Melony Ward and Bernie Miller (eds.), Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2002 [1908]), 19.

12 Ward and Miller, Crime and Ornament, 20.

13 Ibid., 21.

14 Ibid., 22.

15 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987 [1925]), 96.

16 For a continued discussion on this see Hilde Heynen, “Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions,” in Negotiating Domesticity, eds. Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar (New York: Routledge, 2005).

17 Heynen, Negotiating Domesticity, 104.

18 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 192.

19 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (Hacker Art Books: New York, 1970).

20 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966).

21 Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 6–7.

22 Dorothy Rothschild, “Interior Desecration,” Vogue (USA), 49, no. 8 (1917): 54.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 129.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 John Potvin, “Designing the Gender Contest: (Re)Locating the Gay Decorator in the History of Interior Design” in Shaping the American Interior: Structures, Contexts and Practices, eds. Penny Sparke and Paula Lupkin, (London: Routledge, 2018): 59–68.

28 Potvin, “Designing the Gender Contest,” 59–68.

29 “How Can I Become a Decorator?” Upholsterer and Interior Decorator, 71, no. 1 (1923): 97–98.

30 Joel Sanders, “Curtain Wars: Architects, Decorators, and the 20th Century Domestic Interior,” Harvard Design Magazine (Winter/Spring 2002): 16.

31 W. E. Will, “Among Us Moderns,” Los Angeles Sunday Times, August 18, 1926.

32 Dale Beronius, Life, 21 June 1928, 22.

33 H. J. B., “What Is an Interior Decorator?” Upholsterer and Interior Decorator, 73, no. 2 (1924): 82.

34 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 14.

35 David M. Halperin, “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 6, 1 (2000): 92.

36 Henry Urbach, “Closets, Clothes, Disclosure,” in Gender Space Architecture: Interdisciplinary Introduction, ed. Jane Rendell (London: Routledge, 1999), 344–45.

37 Kevin H. F. O’Brien, “‘The House Beautiful’: A Reconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s American Lecture,” Victorian Studies, 17, 4 (June 1974): 401–02.

38 O’Brien, “The House Beautiful,” 402–03.

39 Westminster Gazette, May 27, 1895.

40 In H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: William Hodge and Company, 1948), 240.

41 Hyde, Trials of Oscar Wilde, 248.

42 For more on the YMCA and design, see Paula Lupkin, “For Men by Men: Furnishing the YMCA” in Shaping the American Interior eds. Paula Lupkin and Penny Sparke (London: Routledge, 2018).

43 “Young Men and Prettiness,” Association Men, YMCA Magazine, December 1904: 125.

44 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: A Delta Book, 1964), 54.

45 Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 55, “For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.”

46 Sontag, 57.

47 See Christopher Long, “Ornament, Crime, Myth, and Meaning,” in Architecture: Material and Imagined, Proceedings of the 85th ACSA Annual Meeting and Technology Conference (Washington, DC: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1997), 440–45.

48 Walter Curt Behrendt, Modern Building: Its Nature, Problems, and Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937), 38.

49 Behrendt, Modern Building, 88.

50 Ibid., 90.

51 Ibid., 91.

52 Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London: Reeves and Turner, 1882), 100. 

53 Sally R. Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 95.

54 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 6.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Potvin

John Potvin is professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding (2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013), Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014), winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize, and Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris (2020) [Dept. of Art History, Concordia University, 1515 St. Catherine West, Montreal, QC, H3G 2W1, Canada, [email protected]].