Professor Lasc’s book, Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession, has recently been released as a paperback.
For more details and purchase, please click here.
Description:
This book explores the beginnings of the interior design profession in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on a wealth of visual sources, from collecting and advice manuals to pattern books and department store catalogues, it demonstrates how new forms of print media were used to ‘sell’ the idea of the unified interior as a total work of art, enabling the profession of interior designer to take shape. In observing the dependence of the trades on the artistic and public visual appeal of their work, Interior decorating in nineteenth-century France establishes crucial links between the fields of art history, material and visual culture, and design history.
Reviews:
‘Interior decorating in nineteenth-century France provides a detailed and authoritative study of the ways in which collectors, advice writers, architects, upholsterers and cabinetmakers, decorators and other trades, theatre designers, and workers in the new department stores functioned as proto-interior designers. They bridged today’s professional borders to orchestrate the historicist or otherwise themed spaces in which everyday life in France was played out in the second half of the nineteenth century. Lasc provides a valuable study of the development and professionalisation of interior design in nineteenth-century France which expands and complements the Anglo-American focus of much existing work. She does this through a comprehensive examination of a wealth of primary and secondary sources, and by rethinking assumptions about gender, historicism and modernism and the interplay of a number of professions in interior design practice and mediation.’
Grace Lees-Maffei, Professor of Design History, University of Hertfordshire
‘Framed against the background of widespread economic and social change following the French Revolution, Anca Lasc’s Interior decorating in nineteenth-century France is a convincing and well-documented contribution to the history of the interior design profession in France. It mines a rich but little-examined array of print resources to construct a detailed history of the domestic interior, while also offering a novel interpretation of the origins of l’art nouveau that challenges prevailing views of the dichotomy between historicism and modernity.”
David Raizman, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA
