Designs for Living
Female Designers, the Designing Female, Modernism and the Middlebrow
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12917685 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Chiara Briganti (English and Foreign Languages University, corresponding author), Kathy Mezei |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 155-177 |
| Publication date | 2011-04-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modernist Cultures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-8629 • E-ISSN: 2041-1022 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/mod.2011.0008 |
| OpenAlex | W1989134980 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
During the interwar period, the artistic endeavour of the female interior decorator was dismissed as old-fashioned, nostalgic, and, tainted by its association with commerce; it was excluded from the rarefied circle of the higher arts of painting and sculpture and architecture; in the novels and plays of middlebrow authors of the same period, on the other hand, the female interior decorator, mocked for her edgy modernity, became a disturbing icon of urban modernity and a controversial advocate for new designs in living. This essay proposes to demonstrate how the representation in fiction and drama of the interwar period of the female interior decorator, a magnet for anxieties about changing gender roles, class distinctions, sexuality and sexual ambiguity and the ‘sanctity’ of the home, complicates the complexity and mutability of the middlebrow and its fraught relationship with modernism
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Middlebrow · Modernism (music · Modernity · Painting · Period (music · Sculpture · Sociology · Visual arts · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity · Architecture
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |