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“Louis Quinze est mort, vive Louis Quinze (Revival)!”
Review of Twentieth-Century Decoration.
Stephen Calloway. Rizzoli. 1988.
Rating:
5 out 5 Stars.
Availability:
Out-of-print, but available through the Nick Harvill Libraries website, http://www.nickharvilllibraries.com/2010/01/twentieth-century-decoration-stephen.html.
Synopsis:
This four hundred-page, five-pound book tells the epic story of Twentieth Century design. So far, it is the definitive resource on the subject. It proceeds chronologically, dividing eighty-eight years into five periods. There are over five hundred illustrations presenting examples of major and minor trends—Art Deco, Vogue Regency, Bauhaus, Art Nouveau, English Country, etc. It is an ambitious undertaking under any circumstance, but more so for a book that went to press twelve years before the century ended.
Regardless, it is a great success. The devil might be in the details, but god is in the big ideas. Calloway presents both brilliantly. Concerning the former, they are jam-packed, with hundreds of case studies. As to the latter, he refuses to cede the century entirely to Modernism, calling it a period style worthy of consideration like any other. He arrives at this conclusion by considering design to be two binary fluctuations: “the degree of emptiness or clutter which people find pleasing at a particular time.”
The Twentieth Century’s lasting enthusiasm for Louis Revival was a reaction to the cluttered rooms of the Victorian era. Influential pre-Modernists like Elsie de Wolfe and Ogden Codman preferred the cleaner lines of Eighteenth Century French design—Louis Quatorze, Quinze, Seize and Directoire. To Calloway, it is here that Bauhaus made its biggest impact. The modern perspective permitted a looser interpretation of historical styles. As result, innovation, eclecticism, and personality finally took precedence over slavish reproduction.
That change ushered in the Twentieth Century’s true novelty, which was the rise of the interior designer. As fast-talking lady decorators waved good-by to the large firms specializing in historical regurgitation, home decoration morphed into haute décor. It paralleled fashion in the sense that, “A look appears, is accepted, admired, disseminated and finally devalued by a host of imitators." The decorator rose in status from inferior tradesman to social equal.
This elevation in celebrity required a town crier, or, as we call it today, the shelter magazine. Soon, how a room would photograph rivaled how it would actually function. As Osbert Lancaster put it, people began "to regard a room not so much as a place to live in, but as a setting for a party." That sentiment reached its apotheosis with the grand luxe penthouse apartment Elsie de Wolfe designed for Condé Nast.
This review highlights the big ideas in Twentieth Century design. However, it is also a book of a thousand details. A century is both more and less than the sum of its years. Calloway has no fear of nuance or contradiction. His case studies include a variety of throwbacks, follies, and non-sequiturs. They do not disprove the big theories but do show just how difficult it is to define an era with one unifying theme.
Who’s Featured:
It is a virtual Who’s Who of the century: Ogden Codman, Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Sackville, Paul Poiret, Cecil Beaton, Rex Whistler, Coco Chanel, Jean-Michel Frank, Syrie Maugham, Billy Baldwin, Nancy Lancaster, John Fowler, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Serge Diaghilev, David Hicks, T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Emilio Terry, Albert Hadley, Sister Parish, and many others.
Strengths:
The book uses a wide variety of resources both pictorial and otherwise. Calloway’s approach is highly literate, reaching beyond the visual. He cleverly utilizes relevant passages from novels and other contemporaneous resources to present his ideas. His reading list is exhaustive and makes this book an excellent starting point for uncovering more specialized books on Twentieth Century design.
Achilles' Heel:
Calloway, as a curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum, had full access to its large archive and that of south-of-the-Thames neighbor Country Life. It causes the balance to tip too heavily towards Great Britain. Some of the big American names left out are glaring omissions—Dorothy Draper, Billy Haines, Michael Taylor, and Tony Duquette, for example. Of course, the definitive monographs on such designers were, in 1988, still two decades away.
The book appeared before the renewed interest in Mid-Century Modern, and Calloway’s assessment of it as “glib sophistication” is, well, glib. He found that its significance was almost entirely in public architecture, in which "impoverished materials and levels of finish were disguised as architecturally fashionable functional minimalism." One expects his opinion might now be different, given how easily its elements have proven to mix into eclectic design.
Conclusion:
This is an equal opportunity book. For the textually challenged, there are hundreds of images. For those who enjoy ideas and theory, there is much to contemplate. It would make an excellent gift for a client who truly enjoys the design process. Highly recommend.
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