Articles |
Communications between Traders, Users and Artists
The Growth of German Language Serial Publications on Domestic Interior Decoration in the Later Nineteenth Century
University of East Anglia
Since the twentieth century nothing appears easier than to orient oneself about domestic interior design, be one client, producer or designer. An abundance of images is readily related to factual information. Much of this is possible through effective journals or other serial publications. Beyond giving ‘information’, they help to maintain, on behalf of the producers, the customers' general interest in the subject. In a wider sense they conjure up a pictorial and verbal world of the ‘interior’, which exists alongside the actual interiors. This article on German serial publications begins with a period in which the terms ‘domestic interior decoration’ and ‘interior design’ were not widely understood. Those involved in the creation of any domestic interior below the top level were too entrenched in individual trades. Only from the 1870s did ‘art in the house’ become fully formulated in books, in pictorial volumes and in the journals of the individual trades. A fully fledged magazine, devoted to the domestic interior, Innendekoration, appeared in 1890. Although essentially produced for the trades, it also explicitly addressed itself to consumers. By 1900, a new kind of art journal lifted the status of domestic interior design yet again onto the level of fine art.
Key Words: decorative arts reform—domesticity—Germany—illustrations—interior decoration—publishing