“Interior Decorator is Dead”

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Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I am grateful to Jules Gabellini for help with research.

1 New York Times, June 21, 1956, 29.

2 “The Bulletin Board: Dude Ranch Decoration,” House and Garden, April 1932, 33.

3 For Locher, see Anne M. Lampe, Robert E. Locher: A Modern Classic (Lancaster, PA: Demuth Museum, 2017).

4 Laura, produced and directed by Otto Preminger (1944, Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox). See Alice T. Friedman, “I Noticed His Attention was Fixed Upon My Clock: Masculinity and the Queer Film Interior,” Interiors, 10, nos. 1–2 (2019): 85–102.

5 John Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015) and Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in the 1920s, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020).

6 Le Corbusier, L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, 1925, as quoted by Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort, note 18.

7 Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Dr. Susan Ferentinos is the lead author for Demuth Museum’s 2023 Reinterpretation Project. Her article “The Queer Life of Charles Demuth” and others on individual works of art have been published online: Demuth Foundation, “Charles Demuth” research compilation, accessed April 20, 2023, https://www.demuth.org/charles-demuth

8 As the critic Henry McBride wrote to Florine Stettheimer, “The Demuth house is a knock-out, as you might guess. It’s in the heart of town, with a narrow entrance (decorated chastely by Bobby Locher) that opens out into bigger rooms at the back . . . The house is full of quaint furniture and some amusing works of art”: “Stop 10: ‘The Chateau,’” Demuth Foundation, accessed March 29, 2023, https://www.demuth.org/stop-10-the-chateau

9 See David S. Wallace, “Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present,” The New Yorker, April 30, 2018.

10 “Uncle Bob,” Charlie Schroeder, December 13, 2017, http://charlieschroeder.com/uncategorized/robert-locher/; and “Uncle Bob” in Lampe, Robert E. Locher, 3–7.

11 Karen Krahulik, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York: New York University Press, 2005): 84.

12 Marsden Hartley, “Farewell, Charles,” The New Caravan [1936], in Letters of Charles Demuth, American Artist, 1883–1935, ed. Bruce Kellner, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 172.

13 Life (June 21, 1928): 22; Muriel Draper, “Robert Locher: His Art and Craft,” Creative Arts, 9:1, (July 1, 1931): 52–56. I am grateful to Professor Betsy Fahlman for her scholarship and advice on Locher, Draper, and the Stettheimer salon.

14 Although many sources put the date at 1928, it is clear from the Demuth’s letter to Stieglitz that the painting was still unfinished in September 1929: Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth, 125–26.

15 Ferentinos, “Queer Life of Charles Demuth,” 25–26. See Max Ewing’s letter to his mother, May 1932, where he notes that he “drove to Staten Island and spent the evening with Bobby Locher and his cousin,” adding, “We did not speak of Beatrice.” Max Ewing Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, box 5, folder 32.

16 Robin Jaffee Frank, Charles Demuth Poster Portraits 1923–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 90–96; Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth, 113, note 1; 126, note 1; Barbara Haskell, Charles Demuth (New York: Abrams, 1987), 186–89.

17 Frank, Charles Demuth, 100–06.

18 Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth, 28–29.

19 Ibid., 125–26.

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Notes on contributors

Alice T. Friedman

Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emerita of American art at Wellesley College, where she also served for many years as codirector of the Architecture Program. Friedman is the author of numerous books and articles on gender, sexuality, and the social history of architecture, including House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (Harry N. Abrams, 1998) and American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale University Press, 2010). Her recent scholarship focuses on queer spatial histories, domesticity, and the representation of modernity in the twentieth century [Department of Art, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, [email protected]].