Modern Interiors | Exhibition catalogue

Description

After Art Nouveau and Art Deco, the U.A.M. (Union des Artistes modernes) was founded in 1929, bringing together all the great designers of the time. Modern "equipment" replaced the ornamentation of salons decorated with "trinkets". It was now a question of "de-cluttering" the interior space. Through fifteen essays by art historians, this catalogue explores all the facets of the modern interior in France in the 1920s and 1930s: its heritage from the decorative arts, its articulation with the international avant-garde, such as the Bauhaus; its syncretic dimension involving all the dimensions of creation; the aesthetics of the machine and the metaphors of modernity, such as the liner; and nature as a decorative device.

Three major architectural creations are also analyzed: Robert Mallet-Stevens's Villa Noailles, Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre and Eileen Gray's Villa E-1027.

Finally, between design and fashion, the setting in motion of bodies also redraws a new figure of the modern woman, at the forefront of creation.

The transformation of interior space will also find in the cinema an exhibition device and a privileged communication tool for these paradigm shifts in the perception of the interior.

The catalogue, which explores a decade of design, highlights the richness of the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne, which lends most of the works and objects in the exhibition.