Designing the French Interior
The Modern Home and Mass Media

Designing the French Interior traces France's central role in the development in 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 catalogues, photographs, guidebooks and films, in representing and promoting French interior design to a wider audience.

Contributors to this original volume identify and historicise 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.

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' 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