Moderne: Fashioning the French Interior (Hardcover)
by Sarah Schleuning (Author) Princeton Architectural Press

If you collect prints, especially from the twentieth-century, you may have run across a type of color print called “pochoir.” These are from limited-edition portfolios published in France, mainly in the 1920s, that illustrated a new style of interior decorating that was sweeping sophisticated pre-war Europe.  Moderne, Fashioning the French Interior by Sarah Schleuning, shows a full range of these interiors, reproduced from some of the best known folders, published by Albert Levy and Albert Morance.

These portfolios were a type of magazine, that featured the work of such design luminaries as Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Charlotte Perriand, and Eileen Gray, using a hand application of color to a print using a series of carefully cut stencils. The colors are rich and warm, and were much more accurate than the color photography of the time.  They were also used as exhibitions and displays in department stores and included in decorative arts journals such as Art et Decoration, the leading French publication of the day.  At the height of the medium’s popularity, there were nearly thirty graphic design studios in France utilizing this process.

The fashion designer Paul Poiret was one of the first to use pochoir; you may remember the stunning exhibition of his clothes at the Metropolitan Museum in New York last summer. The show also featured a couple of pochoir portfolios, one titled  “Les Choses de Paul Poiret, 1911” as well as the beautiful program for "the Thousand and Second Night" party held on June 24, 1911 drawn by French artist, Raoul Dufy.
Jeremy Aynsley writes in his introduction “ Poiret turned advertisement, associated with an expendable print culture, into an object of contemplation and delight.  His views on the promotion and sale of design were highly influenced by those of the Vienna Secession, whose members devoted equal attention to designing for fashion and interiors.”

The book shows plates of extraordinary and deeply inspirational interiors— they could be used today for any house or apartment with great success. Using this method, the designers could create the interiors that they wanted, without regard for cost or client, and the prints show their intent clearly. For example a selection from Harmonies-Ruhlmann Interiors, published in 1924, shows incredibly beautiful interiors with Ruhlmann’s furniture, and room designs exactly as he intended them to look.

Intérieurs Français published in 1925, featured woodcuts by Raol Dufy, as well as line drawings by Mallet-Stevens; the Répertoire du Goût Moderne also included drawings of furniture, china, and carpet designs. The author, Sarah Schleuning, from the Wolfsonian Museum, says that they form “a vibrant and original record of modern French design that was current at the time.”  They may also surprise the purists, whose vision of the period is based on the black-and-white photography of the day.  Color was used abundantly, with a richness and strength that is not normally associated with early Modernism.

The prints show fascinating details, and the color dazzles. In a Mallet-Stevens design for a hall, a modernist slab attached to a central pillar becomes an indoor fountain with rectangular cylinders suspended from the ceiling to conceal lighting. A string of small blobs along the wall, no doubt to provide heat, are an important compositional element of the design. The floor is a solid bright yellow. Then a dining room by Martine is furnished with breath-taking orange furniture upholstered in turquoise. This arrangement sits on a black-and-white checked floor; from above hangs a turquoise glass chandelier.  All of this is incredibly chic and glamorous --  and very French.

“Fashioning the Modern French Interior: Pochoir Portfolios in the 1920s” will open at the Wolfsonian in Miami on November 16, 2007 and will continue to May 11, 2008 . I would also suggest a trip down there to see this exhibition and the actual prints themselves, as they are a real inspiration.