Art, Decoration, and the Texture of Modern Experience: The Interior Before 1900

Abstract

This dissertation explores the critical fascination among artists, architects, and their publics with the interior and its image at the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing primarily on Belgium and France, it argues that the ambition to create work that engaged, confronted, and constructed the shifting texture of the wider world motivated much of this representational engagement with the interior. Whereas it had once constituted a paradigm for bourgeois fantasies of protective retreat, by the 1880s, new challenges of modernity prompted a destabilization and reconfiguration of the interior's representational and cultural resonances. These challenges included sweeping industrialization and urbanization, developments in psychological research, an increasingly fractured political landscape, and the combined juggernaut of exploitation and attempts to resist it. Questioning the widespread assumption that the interior was merely a defensive, nostalgic asylum from a turbulent and spectacular modern world, in my account it is rather recognized as a pervasive paradigm integral to modern life and an index of cultural transition at the turn of the century. In seeking to create work that critically engaged this revolutionizing modern world, artists and designers were faced with new formal problems. They responded by attempting to evoke experiential realities of such a world through new configurations of the spatial environment. Focusing on case studies that traverse a range of media, national and political boundaries, and critical ambitions, this dissertation assesses how material, psychological, or political components of an older program of the bourgeois interior were individually engaged, and challenged, through experimental artistic practices. Subjects of analysis include: James Ensor's painted interior scenes and their prompts to visually remodel a relation of the self and the stuff of everyday life, the materials and materiality of modern existence; Édouard Vuillard's intimiste paintings and "environmental" pictorial practices in relation to changing conceptions of interiority and the modern, psychological self; and Henry van de Velde's socially-inflected experiments in which he conflated notions of the activated, charged surface of contemporaneous painting with enlivened interiors realized in architectural design. As these case studies attest, the interior provoked no single response; however, by the end of the century and in response to its reimagined resonance in the wider culture, fruitful interplays arose between pictorial concerns and the architectural, lived environment. These experimentations with the interior were activated with the goal of evoking the complexities of experience in the modern world. Such complexity, I demonstrate, was not founded in the progressive dissolution of one form of representation for another, but rather in negotiating the ways in which we might understand the world-and the image- to continually and vibrantly negotiate between private and public, individual and collective, space and picture plane. By reassessing the role of artistic practice across media in this way, the interior offers itself up as a tool, a way in, to dynamically address the relation between the individual, phenomenological encounter with the image and broader conditions of historical change. This "interior effect," I argue, also has powerful consequences for the study of late-nineteenth century art and culture, and for a productive reassessment of the interplay between Art and Architectural History.PHDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144186/1/aefraser_1.pd