Exhibition

The Modern Interior in the Jazz Age

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THE EXHIBITION The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s, on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from September 30 until January 14, 2018 (after its debut earlier this year at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum), reminds us of the many ways the modern movement transformed the spaces of everyday life—beauty salons, shops, theaters, hotels, restaurants, offices, and the more intimate spaces of the home. Textiles, furniture, lighting, and decorative accents took on fresh angles, colors, and silhouettes that tempted with promises of luxury, glamour, speed, and other diversions from reality.

Retail displays, advertisements, exhibitions, and articles educated and advised consumers on how these new objects could add both beauty and usefulness to spaces at home, work, and leisure. Interior decorators, stylists, designers, and artists guided homemakers, architects, and manufacturers to achieve successful integration or transformation in the modern mode. In the 1920s interior decoration was a newly developed profession for women, among them the Chicago-based Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, who became one of the most forward-thinking American figures in the field. She oversaw the evolution of important public and private interiors including the Casino Club, the Fortnightly of Chicago, the Arts Club, and the Auditorium Theatre, all in Chicago, as well as the Double Six Club in the Waldorf-Astoria and Elizabeth Arden’s salon in New York.

Carpenter’s career fused the worlds of design and music. Her husband, John Alden Carpenter, was one of the first composers to use jazz rhythms in orchestral music, and his ballet “Skyscrapers” was performed in both New York and Munich. The couple was active in social circles with Gerald and Sara Murphy and Igor Stravinsky. Rue was president of the Arts Club in Chicago and responsible for opening Chicagoans’ eyes to the work of Brancusi, Braque, Picasso, and more. The author Stephen Longstreet recalled that she was “avant-garde when the word was unknown in Chicago.” In an article in Vogue in 1930, Carpenter wrote of how the process of devising an interior scheme paralleled that of her husband’s work in musical composition: “Just as the composer may feel a significance in certain chance rhythms and combinations of sound, so the decorator may find his starting-point in the colour of a flower on a vase or in a figure in a carpet, and the whole colour structure of the room then becomes a logical development of the original scheme, with perhaps a secondary related theme for variety with its own characteristic development, all these elements firmly fused into an organic whole.”

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Side chair by Joseph Urban, 1925. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Gift of Dorothy S. Teegen and Carola Teegen Walton in memory of Otto J. Teegen/ Courtesy of the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York/ Photo © Smithsonian Institution

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Carpenter advocated mixing pieces inspired by a range of historical periods to create a novel style. In 1930, when she decorated Elizabeth Arden’s salon in New York, its design in black, silver, and emerald green tones with Directoire and Empire-style furniture was called by Vogue “the most recent and luxurious version of the beauty parlour.”

The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s explores the stylistic evolution of the modern interior via a range of objects. For example, a lamp from the Arden salon evokes classical elegance; drawings for lighting fixtures for the Fisher Theatre in Detroit express striking Mayan influence; furniture from fashion designer Jacques Doucet’s studio offers luxurious exoticism; wrought-iron doors to an executive suite in the Chanin Building channel the kinetic energy of the Machine Age; and a chair from architect and designer Joseph Urban’s office adheres to a strict geometrical framework. The provocative variation among these objects, all produced within about a decade of one another, is representative of the modern interiors that the American consumer, arts patron, or businessperson might have encountered in the 1920s.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, these wide-ranging objects can be understood as part of a greater artistic and cultural reaction to the lifestyle of the 1920s that also included jazz music. The historian and critic Lewis Mumford, following his visit to An Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art at the New York department store Lord & Taylor in 1928, explained how he perceived that art, design, and jazz intertwined: “On the side of form, a certain severity and rigor is essential to modern art: but this does not hold true of feeling, for the organic opposition, which leads the office worker to spend his evenings in the abandonments of jazz, may also have its counterpart in decoration.” Such formal tensions between rigidity and fluidity, provocative stylistic combination, and a desire for new creative expression and freedom drove the diversity of design production that this exhibition celebrates.

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